My favorite writing exercise involves the revision of a single sentence about a funeral service held at the Georgia Aquarium for a beluga whale, dead from a bacterial infection. The loss of the charismatic mammal was deeply felt and inspired a public ceremony of mourning. Mark Davis covered the event for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a moving account that included this sentence:
The crowd gathered and knelt around the 12-foot creature.
This is a fine sentence, but I’ve argued that it could be better and have offered a revision more aligned to the writer’s mission and purpose.
When I teach this example, I challenge the writers in the classroom or audience to make the repair: “Try to improve this sentence,” I say, “without adding or deleting or changing a word. See if you can improve it by taking Mark’s words and moving them around.” A number of revisions are suggested, but my favorite goes like this.
The crowd gathered around the 12-foot creature and knelt.
Most readers agree that moving “knelt” to a position of emphasis next to the period — or what the Brits more accurately call the full stop — lends the sentence some added weight, some “gravitas” if you prefer. But why? If we can answer that question, we can begin to unravel the complex web of language that best captures meaning and emotion.
One way to describe our sample sentence is to say that it is simple. That word does not mean that the sentence is “simplistic” or “simplified.” “Simple” has a technical meaning in this context: that the sentence consists of one, and only one, independent or main clause — that is, a group of words with a subject and verb that can stand alone as a complete thought.
(As I complete that last paragraph, I am startled at how much I take for granted about what you already know about language. What is a subject? What is a verb? What constitutes a complete thought?)
It turns out that a simple sentence can carry more than one verb, which happens here when the subject “crowd” performs two actions: the crowd gathers, then kneels. It turns out that the crowd could do a million things and the sentence would still be “simple,” as long as it forms that one clause. A simple sentence can also have a million subjects as in a hypothetical sentence that begins by listing every name in the phone book and concludes with “… are names included in this year’s phone book.”
The subject, “crowd,” is called a collective noun, which means that while it makes us imagine the plural — all the people at the funeral — it asks us to imagine them as one. If you were writing the sentence in the present tense, say to give it more immediacy, the sense that it is happening now, you might write, “The 247 in the crowd gather and kneel.” To make subject and verbs agree, the plural subject, “247,” takes the plural verbs “gather” and “kneel.” But if “crowd” were the subject of the sentence, rather than the object of the preposition, the collective noun in American English would take singular verbs, “The crowd gathers and kneels.”
We have many useful ways to talk about verbs. One is tense, which indicates where in time an action occurs, a distinction we demonstrated when we turned verbs in the past tense (gathered, knelt) into the present (gathers, kneels). We describe one of those verbs, “to gather” (that form is called the infinitive because it is not weighted by time), as a regular verb because the past tense is formed by adding “ed” to the present (gather becomes gathered). You cannot make that change with “kneel.” “Kneel” cannot become “kneeled” unless you hope to demonstrate that a speaker or writer is using a nonstandard form of English. So the crowd gathered but did not “kneeled.” Because “kneel” is an irregular verb, the crowd “knelt.”
Verbs also have something called voice, a technical term that should not be confused with “voice” as an effect of the writer’s persona and style. In our context, voice describes the relationship between subject and verb in terms of who did what. If the subject performs the action, as it does in our sample, we call that active because the subject is acting. If the subject takes no action but is only acted upon, the effect is called passive, as in, “The boisterous crowd was silenced by the minister.” Here the crowd receives the action – it was silenced – so the verb is passive.
One other distinction deserves our attention, and that is the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. If the verb takes a direct object, we call it “transitive” because it carries its meaning across (the Latin prefix is trans) from subject to object. It is hard for me to think of verbs that are always transitive or always intransitive. In the scriptural sentence “Jesus wept,” the verb takes no object. But if the evangelist had been wordier, Jesus might have wept “bitter tears,” making the verb transitive. An intransitive verb fits nicely at the end of a sentence.
In “the crowd gathered,” the verb takes no object, but it certainly does in the famous poetic line: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” I argued to a group of teachers that “knelt” was always intransitive until one wise guy constructed this sentence: “The maharaja knelt the elephant so the princess could dismount.”
To further understand what happens in our revision, we must recognize that words have both denotations and connotations. A word “denotes” its literal meaning, so a “creature” in our sentence means a living being, or one that was once alive, but the word also carries a set of associations, some of which can be in conflict. For example, the color blue can connote something positive (“Blue skies smilin’ at me …”) or negative (“I guess that’s why they call it the blues”). “Creature” gives the sense of something created, one of God’s creatures, but if the creator is Dr. Frankenstein (“that’s Fronkensteen”), the creature turns out to be a monster. Think of the great horror movie classic “Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
To kneel (there’s that infinite form again) means to bend one’s knee, but the word carries some powerful connotations, associations with worship, ceremony, liturgy, prayer, grief, obeisance.
Finally, English is a language in which some syllables are stressed. Others, you might say, are “dis-stressed.” In the word “garage,” the Brits tend to stress the first syllable (GAR-age), while the Yanks emphasize the second (gar-AGE). So if you end our test sentence with “creature,” you end it on an unstressed syllable. But “knelt” allows the reader to land on a stress, which further nails the meaning.
So let’s take some of these distinctions and apply them to our test case in order to answer the question: Why does the revision make the sentence better?
Here are my arguments:
- It places the most interesting and powerful word in the most emphatic location, next to the period, or what the Brits call the “full stop.”
- It places an informational phrase — 12-foot creature — in the middle, giving it a useful function but less emphasis.
- The writer can take advantage of the powerful associations of “knelt” as well as its physical meaning.
- The revision replaces a static noun (creature) with an active verb (knelt).
- The revision ends the sentence on a stressed rather than unstressed syllable.
- That replacement magnifies the sequential narrative elements over a still image, turning a snapshot into a movie.
- Because it allows the writer to replace a vague, Latinate, two-syllable noun with a one-syllable, active, intransitive verb. (As they’d say in gymnastics, it sticks the landing.)
Whew. One small revision in a sentence of nine words accomplishes a lot. And consider how many fields of language study the revision has revealed:
- Punctuation
- Grammar
- Syntax
- Semantics
- Etymology
- Poetics
- Rhetoric
- Style
- Narrative theory
A motive for this revision can be traced to centuries of careful thought on language and literature. I’m sure if I were alive back in first century Rome, I would have been going to toga parties and fiddling around with Nero, but I also would’ve been sitting at the feet of educator and orator Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, known to us as Quintilian, who argued:
The Q-Man understood that the technical aspects of language are best learned, not from some detached scientific study, but in the practice of making meaning.