Words Fail Me Part 5

The same problem can crop up with an adverb in a series. You might write this in a brochure for a health spa: Our clients vigorously exercise, diet, and meditate. Or: Our clients diet, meditate, and exercise vigorously. Oh, really? In each case, the modifier, vigorously, seems to cover the whole list. Unless these dynamos believe in doing everything vigorously, even meditating, make it: Our clients diet, meditate, and vigorously exercise.

Putting the modified item last is usually the best solution. With a list of verbs, though, that's not always possible. Back at the fat farm, suppose you're describing a normal day's routine and you'd like to keep things chronological: After lunch, clients lightly nap, lift weights, and shower.

Huh? Your patrons probably don't lift weights lightly or shower lightly. But you'd like your list of activities to stay in the same order. In that case, move the adverb (lightly) to follow the verb it belongs with (nap): After lunch, clients nap lightly, lift weights, and shower. There's no way a reader would misunderstand that sentence, even skimming lightly.

A phrase that's placed inappropriately in a series can contaminate all the items that follow. Here's a sentence you might find on a Web page for gardeners: Fungicides are useless against bacteria that infect plants, viruses, and insects.

Exactly how helpless are these fungicides? Are they useless only against bacteria-the kinds that infect plants and viruses and insects? Or are they useless against three different plagues: bacteria, viruses, and insects? If we a.s.sume the writer means all three plagues, the solution, again, is to move the confusing phrase, that infect plants, to the end of the sentence: Fungicides are useless against viruses, insects, and bacteria that infect plants.

Superfluous Redundancies.

For some writers, once is not enough. They don't beat a dead horse; they beat a totally dead horse. They use modifiers that say the same thing as the words they modify. For them, every fact is a true fact. They don't expedite; they speedily expedite. They don't smell a stench; they smell a malodorous stench. In other words, they're redundant. Or as they might put it, superfluously redundant.

You might receive a business memo like this from one of these writers: My final conclusion is that preliminary planning and exploratory research by qualified experts have a.s.suredly guaranteed the successful triumph of our latest new product. Now that it's completely finished, and the initial debut is imminently approaching, I'm happily elated to report that any perplexing problems have been definitively resolved. Our only compet.i.tor of major significance is rigidly inflexible and indifferently oblivious of market demand. It's not an unexpected surprise that consumers are responding to our campaign drive with positive affirmation. I suggest that we not only doggedly persist in our prearranged strategy but also widely expand it by offering free gifts. Don't you feel like that totally dead horse by now?

When Words Collide.

Back in junior high, my friends and I used to trade Tom Swift jokes. The pattern was always the same: a remark by the fictional Tom Swift, followed by the punch line-an adverb. One in particular had me rolling on the floor: "That's the last time I'll put my arm in a lion's mouth," said Tom offhandedly. (I was easily amused in those days.) Tom Swifties were funny because their modifiers could be read two ways, one of them apparently unintentional. The more outrageous they were, the funnier. But if you don't intend to be funny, beware of descriptive words or phrases that could seem ridiculous if taken literally. Readers will do a double-take if you describe a painting as priceless and then give the price it sold for at auction. Likewise, don't say that an invoice is generally specific, or that a stock fund has gradually skyrocketed, or that a squabbling committee is wholly divided. Unless you're making a play on words (Canapes lead a hand-to-mouth existence), be on the lookout for collisions like these: You may leave the table, Dennis, when your plate is fully empty.

Fashion models are largely size four.

Dad clearly misunderstood.

Kirstie finds acupuncture intensely relaxing.

The gnat is vastly minuscule and its brain is immensely tiny.

Yves likes his coffee mildly strong.

Little Ricky will grow taller shortly.

Boris's intentions became vaguely clearer.

Marcel will presently fill us in on the past.

The Blandingses bought the house completely unfinished.

For the Cratchits, poverty was richly rewarding.

Madalyn religiously attended Atheists Anonymous.

The computer crash was a minor disaster.

Miss Pym offered us a slice of twelve-ounce pound cake.

In October 1929, the market plunged in an unparalleled spiral.

Unless you're curiously indifferent, there's more about illogical writing in chapter 17.

s.p.a.ce Savers.

Do you use macros when you work on a computer? They let us store multiple commands on one key, so we can do several things with a single stroke. Sometimes an adjective or adverb acts like a macro. It lets us compress several words of description into one nifty modifier. These sentences, for example, mean the same thing: Courtney wore jeans that were faded and a shirt that was dirty and full of wrinkles.

Courtney wore faded jeans and a dirty, wrinkled shirt.

The second sentence, with its tighter adjectives, makes the first seem loose and flabby. Adverbs can be just as efficient at firming up pudgy sentences. These sentences, which say the same thing, show how one word can do the work of four: They dismissed her in a thoughtless manner.

They dismissed her thoughtlessly.

Of course, you may not always want to cut a description short. If Courtney normally dresses in immaculate Armani suits with nary a thread out of place, you might want to call attention to her dishevelment. Most of the time, though, shorter is better-especially when you're short on room and long on description.

Words in Flight.

A little imagination can do a lot more for your descriptive writing than a pageful of adjectives and adverbs. Take a closer look at some of your favorite authors. You'll be surprised at how little their vividness depends on modifiers and how much it owes to imagination.

I'm not necessarily talking about the literary All-Stars. There's imaginative writing in every field, writing that jumps off the page. Whatever your favorite reading is about-birds or cooking or fashion or movies or gardening-that's where you should look for descriptions that aren't smothered in adjectives and adverbs.

Are you a bird-watcher? In one of his field guides, Roger Tory Peterson described the chimney swift as "a cigar with wings" and said the purple finch looked like "a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice."Do you read the fashion pages? Kennedy Fraser, writing about a Balenciaga dress, pictured a woman's legs coming out of the ruffled taffeta "like stamens from a black chrysanthemum."

Gertrude Jekyll, the English landscape architect, wrote that a blanket of columbines looked like "patches in an old, much-washed, cotton patchwork quilt." And the critic Pauline Kael described a noisy, abrasive action movie filmed in the Big Apple as"an aggravated case of New York."

In The Smithsonian Guides to Natural America, Suzanne Winckler had this to say of my home state: "Iowa is voluptuous, its landscapes all gentle angles of thighs, elbows, scapulas, vertebrae, and big round b.u.t.tocks." Wowee!

The food writer M.F.K. Fisher once sneered at party dips as "mixtures to be paddled in by drinkers armed with everything from raw green beans to reinforced potato chips." If that doesn't make you swear off crudites, nothing will. Good Dog, Bad Dog, a training book by Mordecai Siegal and Matthew Margolis, compared a seated ba.s.set hound to "a jacked-up car with a flat tire."

As I've said before, don't overlook the newspapers. A tribute by Frank DeCaro in the New York Times described the late TV talk-show host Virginia Graham's lacquered hairdo as "an abstract form resembling a Dairy Queen soft-serve crossed with the Nike Swoosh."

So the next time an adjective or adverb comes too readily to mind, do what your favorite writers do. Use your imagination instead. Rather than reach for the thesaurus to describe something, imagine it. Think of that little cigar with wings.

12. Too Marvelous for Words.

THE SENSIBLE SENTENCE.

Like a superhighway, the sentence is a triumph of engineering: the stately capital letter, the procession of words in their proper order, every arch and tunnel, bridge and b.u.t.tress perfectly fitted to its job.

If many writers believe bigger is better, who can blame them? Building a sentence can give you a thrill. It's easy to become infatuated with your own words, and once you get started you hate to stop. The n.o.ble pageant goes on and on, especially if you've discovered dashes and semicolons, and gluey words like however and nevertheless. Your mighty sentence swells, as does your head. "Awesome," you think.

Your poor readers, meanwhile, trudge on, peering wistfully toward the horizon in search of a period. They soon lose track of the subject, and the mighty sentence becomes a road to nowhere.

What went wrong? Length alone isn't the answer. If you've been told that short sentences are always better than long ones, forget it. It's better to mix them up, because writing that has too many short, choppy sentences is just as tedious as writing that has too many long ones. What matters most with any sentence, short or long, is how it's put together. A long sentence will hold up if it's structurally sound, and a short one will collapse if it'snot properly constructed.

This business about sentence construction isn't some abstract idea. It can determine whether your writing makes sense. Let's inspect some of the structural flaws that can undermine sentences.

Speed b.u.mps.

When a sentence works, we can follow it smoothly from beginning to end. If you saw this one in your local paper, you'd have to read it twice: The get-rich-quick scheme that Karl LaFong, the former mayor, and Egbert Souse and Cuthbert J. Twillie, his confederates, cooked up-a theme park built on alligator-infested swampland near a derelict nuclear power plant on the northern outskirts of the city-is believed to have bankrupted some of Lakeville's leading citizens.

The problem with the sentence isn't its length but its b.u.mpy construction. Ideas don't follow one another smoothly. One interrupts another (b.u.mp!), and is interrupted in turn (b.u.mp!), until we lose the point of the sentence.

Look again at some of the speed b.u.mps. The subject in the sentence is that get-rich-quick scheme. But before we learn what mayhem the scheme caused (the point of the sentence), we hit two teeth-rattling b.u.mps, interrupting to tell us (1) who did the fleecing and (2) what the scam was about. Even those interruptions get interrupted. No wonder we lose our way.

Here's a version that gives us one idea at a time: Former Mayor Karl LaFong and his confederates Egbert Souse and Cuthbert J. Twillie are believed to have bankrupted some of Lakeville's leading citizens with a get-rich-quick scheme-a theme park built on alligator-infested swampland near a derelict nuclear power plant on the northern outskirts of the city.

It's still a whopping big sentence, bigger than I'd like, but it works. It gives the reader one idea at a time, each completed before another is introduced. No speed b.u.mps, thank you.

Long Division.

In the hands of our best writers, long sentences can knock your socks off. In this pa.s.sage from Rabbit, Run, John Updike alternates long and short sentences to build suspense as Rabbit Angstrom, cigarette in mouth, shoots a basket before a group of schoolboys.

"As they stare hushed he sights squinting through blue clouds of weed smoke, a suddenly dark silhouette like a smokestack against the afternoon spring sky, setting his feet with care, wiggling the ball with nervousness in front of his chest, one widespread white hand on top of the ball and the other underneath, jiggling it patiently to get some adjustment in air itself. The cuticle moons on his fingernails are big. Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of his coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball will miss because though he shot from an angle the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper."

We can follow a long sentence when it's presented one idea at a time. But often, long sentences are too much to swallow. This one would choke a horse: The play of moonlight and shadow in the darkened, unfamiliar kitchen, which reminded Fergie of her boarding school days and her daring midnight raids on the pantry, hair-raising adventures that could have gotten her expelled, made it difficult for her to copy her mother-in-law's secret recipe for Windsor compote.

Unless a long sentence demands to be consumed in one gulp, break it in two: The play of moonlight and shadow in the darkened, unfamiliar kitchen made it difficult for Fergie to copy her mother-in-law's recipe for Windsor compote. She was reminded of her boarding school days and those daring midnight raids on the pantry, hair-raising adventures that could have gotten her expelled.

Don't rule out long sentences-just remember that they're hard to write well. If you've written a long sentence and you're not sure that it works, it probably doesn't. Break it up. Not many writer scan handle long sentences as gracefully as Updike.

Betwixt and Between.

There's an old saying that it's not the pearls that make a necklace-it's the string. The parts of a sentence won't make a necklace, either, without something to hold them together.

This sentence, for example, has no string: Warren says the stock is undervalued, he doesn't know whether it's. .h.i.t bottom yet.

It sounds as if there's something missing, doesn't it? That's because the example isn't really a sentence. It's two sentences trying to be one. This sin of omission is sometimes called a run-on sentence because, well, it runs on. Its parts are unconnected, like pearls without a string. The comma alone can't hold them together.

There are three ways to fix a sentence whose parts aren't joined correctly: * Add a connecting word (and, but, or, although, however, etc.): Warren says the stock is undervalued, but he doesn't know whether it's. .h.i.t bottom yet.

* Use a semicolon instead of a comma: Warren says the stock is undervalued; he doesn't know whether it's. .h.i.t bottom yet.

* Break the sentence in two: Warren says the stock is undervalued. He doesn't know whether it's. .h.i.t bottom yet.

All three are correct. But since the two-sentence version is choppy and the semicolon seems too formal, my choice in this case is to add a connecting word.

Be careful about some connecting words, however. In fact, let's use however as an example. It's often misused because writers don't make clear which part of the sentence it goes with: Warren says the stock is undervalued, however, he doesn't know whether it's. .h.i.t bottom yet.

Where does however belong, with the first part of the sentence or the second?Here's how to fix a however problem: * Make two sentences, attaching however to the appropriate one. You could mean this: Warren says the stock is undervalued, however. He doesn't know whether it's. .h.i.t bottom yet. Or perhaps this: Warren says the stock is undervalued. However, he doesn't know whether it's. .h.i.t bottom yet.

* Use a semicolon and attach however to the appropriate part of the sentence. You might mean this: Warren says the stock is undervalued, however;he doesn't know whether it's. .h.i.t bottom yet. Or this: Warren says the stock is undervalued; however, he doesn't know whether it's. .h.i.t bottom yet.

Before sharing your pearls of wisdom, make sure there are strings attached.

13. Made for Each Other.