Dynamics of sentence formation

We get thoughts to sculpt into sentences from two fountainheads: one is life experiences and the other, imagination. Through his crisp and terse sentences, Ernest Hemingway transformed into paragons of writing style his adventures of life and heroics in various civil wars as a reporter and ambulance driver. With a stark contrast, Oscar Wilde resorted to his fertile imagination to create marvellous literary pieces, manifestations of his “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

George Orwell, in his classic “Politics and the English Language”, suggests that the communicative power of writing pivots on answering four questions: “1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom [i.e., metaphor] will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?” The classic advice to young writers urges them: “Pay attention to the ounces, and the pounds take care of themselves.” Something very similar is true of writing: Pay attention to your sentences, and most other writing problems take care of themselves. A well-crafted sentence requires clarity of thought first. It weeds out redundancy, which is the use of words more than needed. When the writer himself is not clear in mind, his sentences will impel readers to abscond the reading.

For students who study English as a second language, the hurdle in making lucid sentences is the faulty grammatical parallelism in sentence structure. For instance, with a consistent subject doing both actions, the actions must be written as either active voice or passive voice. The sentence “You can eat it here or it can be taken away” must be written as “You can eat it here or take it away” or “It can be eaten here or taken away.” Another violation of parallelism is committed while naming a series of nouns that includes one gerund or an infinitive. The sentence “We value excellence, trust, transparency, and thinking out of the box” must be put as “We value excellence, trust, transparency, and innovation.” We must be cautious about the use of Oxford comma, also called serial comma. The sentence “My favourite personalities are my two uncles, Allama Iqbal and Quaid-e Azam” implies two favourite personalities having biological relation with the speaker. A comma must be placed before “and” to say there are four favourite personalities.

The functionality of a sentence is put to test when it is placed as a topic sentence of a paragraph. A good topic sentence makes a statement about your topic that limits it to a certain extent. One good way to limit your topic is to place keywords or phrases in the topic sentence. These words and phrases will let the reader know how you are going to discuss the topic. A topic sentence notably stipulates one aspect of the topic per paragraph.

The length and intricacy of a sentence will vary depending on what you want to say. A straightforward sentence works best when conveying an emphasised point in an explicit and succinct manner. Such a sentence qualifies for a topic or concluding sentence in a paragraph. However, if you want to dilate on a point and analyse in detail, a complex sentence is more appropriate.

When we clothe an idea in a metaphor, it lights up the readers’ sensory and motor neurons, and enlivens the sentence with an ‘aha moment’. “Show, don’t tell” is deemed as the main tenet of a writing style. Instead of saying “He lives a poor life”, we should write “He hardly eats three meals a day.” Prefer “She was tapping the floor with her red stilleto” to “She was happy.”

“A crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase,” Harvard psycholinguist Steven Pinker wrote, “are among life’s greatest pleasures.” Understanding which words tend to appear together and the level of formality they carry (known as “register”) is part of knowing a language. We access this knowledge of language usage through (unconscious) acquisition or (conscious) learning, albeit in different ways.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 22^nd, 2023.

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