by Robert Levine

Created on: April 15, 2008

The word "text" comes from the same root as "textile." A written work is a fabric woven from many individual threads-sentences. In a piece of writing, sentences should work together to form a clear overall design, but they can't if their threads are tangled or wander outside their place in the pattern. Hence the importance of good sentence structure, or syntax.

When you need to play it safe, stick to the simple sentence, which consists of a single independent clause. The New St. Martin's Handbook defines a clause as "a group of words containing a subject and a predicate," and continues, "Independent clauses . . . can stand alone as complete sentences . . ." Simple sentences can be as, well, simple and as brief as "She sang." The pronoun "she" serves as the subject, while the verb "sang" provides the grammatical minimum for a predicate.

Make the simple sentence your model as you write. "Short sentences are the meat and bones of good writing," declare Diana Roberts Wienbroer et al. in Rules of Thumb For Business Writers. They recommend, "Intersperse short sentences throughout your writing for clarity and strength.

They can simplify an idea. . . .
They can add rhythm. . . .
They can be blunt and forceful."

In The Elements of Style, William Strunk and E. B. White argue, "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words . . . for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." The more elaborate or complex the machine, the more things can go wrong or the more difficult it may be to operate. The same holds true for writing: the more structurally involved the sentence, the greater the chance of error in syntax, grammar, or style by the writer or of confusion on the part of the reader. Simple sentences transmit information to the reader straightforwardly, with a minimum of internal distraction or interference.

In fact, most bad sentences fail because they stray too far from this mold-the writer bites off more than he or she can chew. British writer Kingsley Amis, in his book The King's English, recalls from his journalistic days a syntactical error over-enthusiastic fellow reporters fell prone to that he names the "gorged snake" sentence. Trying to pack as much information into one sentence as possible, they loaded it with clause after clause, phrase after phrase, until it stretched down the page for many lines, eventually too weighed down by its own mass to move the article forward. Strunk

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