Wrong Way, Write Way

A 10-page, double-spaced paper contains about 125 sentences. The English language is wonderfully flexible - each of those sentences can be written many different ways and still convey the same point. But just because a sentence is valid does not mean it is well written. As a writer, your job is not simply to put your thoughts into words - your job is much more difficult. Your job is to write words that, when your reader reads them, will convey your intention as easily and efficiently as possible.

Consider the following sentence:

The horse raced past the barn fell.

Is this a valid sentence? You may be surprised to learn that it is, in fact, a valid sentence. It is also extremely poorly written.

The reason the above sentence is so difficult to parse is because horses race and barns fall. Readers are naturally biased to assume that the verb will follow the subject of the sentence - that nouns will be paired with the closest verb.

The sentence only becomes understandable when you realize that "raced past the barn" is an adjectival phrase modifying the noun "horse". In other words, the above sentence is the same as the following sentence:

The horse, which was raced past the barn, fell.

Only now is the meaning of the sentence clear, although it was valid in both cases. Does that mean the writer was "correct" in both cases? Only if the writer views his or her job as the crafting of valid sentences to express his or her ideas. If the writer views his or her job as making it easy for the reader to grasp the intended meaning of the writer, then only the second sentence is correct. Still better, though, would be finding a way to bring the subject and verb together:

While being raced past the barn, the horse fell.

This sentence is still better, since it now conforms to the readers' expectation of the subject and verb being close together. (The new version has the additional benefit of being "poetic" - when horses fall, they do so suddenly and violently, and this is conveyed not only by the word "fall" but also the brevity and suddenness "the horse fell" relative to the longer introductory clause.) This new version is also better because it resolves an ambiguity in the first two versions: the horse - the one that had been raced past the barn - fell, but did it do so while it was going past the barn or did it do so later? It might even have been the next day (the horse, which had been raced past the barn yesterday, fell today while on a routine trot).

I've spent a lot of time on one particular badly written sentence, but the general point is this: you can always express an idea in multiple ways. It is very likely that one way will be the easiest for your reader to mentally process. Your job does not end until you figure out which version of the sentence is the best version. That's precisely the reason writing is hard - you must think your way through each of those 125 sentences. It's hard work - but that's the work of writing.