Sentence Structure Struggles

Crafting Complex Sentence With Care

Happy Pride, friends! 

I want everyone to know that I spent a not-insignificant amount of time researching the word bugaboo before I decided to change the article title to “struggles.” I intended bugaboo in the sense of a scary boogeyman or object of fear, which seems to be an accurate definition. Bugaboo is also a Dutch company that makes baby strollers, which makes perfect sense because babies are an object of fear. The term does not seem to have a pejorative meaning, but I just can’t shake the fear that maybe it does. That, friends, is my bugaboo bugaboo.

This article is also kind of a bugaboo in that it was originally planned for April (screaming emoji) and I have had to keep pushing it back for one reason or another till I started to wonder—is this article cursed? Listen, this article is not cursed. And even if it were cursed—which I am not saying it is—it is definitely not the kind of curse where as soon as you finish reading it your SMS notification will go off and the messages just says “seven days” and if you don’t make someone else read Shelf Life within seven days you die.

Just to be safe, maybe you should share Shelf Life. You never know.

Sentences are funny. They can be as short or as long as you want. On one hand, you can make a sentence of just one word—“Stop!” On the other hand, Ayn Rand probably once wrote a sentence so long that if laid out in a continuous line in twelve-point Times New Roman it would stretch all the way to Pluto.

As I discussed in a recent Shelf Life that was really more of a ramble than an article, it is a misguided belief that good prose is that which is as lean and spare as humanly possible. Write as beautifully as you want. Be a belletrist. Don’t let the patriarchy say you can’t. No, not a Bellatrix. Stop, get back in your cell.

But as your sentences get longer and more complex, you can run the risk of creating grammatical errors that confuse your reader or push them out of the text—the kind of errors that make you stop and re-read the sentence you just read, to try and make sure you understood it. I encounter one of those perhaps once in every three or four books I read, and it’s never a good experience.

I’m not in favor of prescriptive grammar rules, generally. Yes, I’m an editor. That said, when communicating with others in written or spoken form, I don’t believe enforcing these rules is necessary or beneficial in any way. Not everyone gets access to the same degree of education and training. Not everybody has the time or the inclination to study the language. Not everyone is handed the same tools to work with. The important thing is communicating what you mean. It is not my job to police people on how they do that outside of my working hours.

If you’re good at something you don’t do it for free. (Don’t think too hard about why Shelf Life is free.) 

And anyway, trust me, nothing does less for whatever argument you are trying to make online than nitpicking someone’s grammar or spelling.

As I’ve talked about before in Shelf Life, there are plenty of writing rules you can blissfully ignore or even willfully break with wild abandon. I stand by my previous. But you do want to make sure to build your sentences on a solid foundation so that your reader can quickly and clearly understand your meaning, without having to disengage from the text to figure it out. That doesn’t mean using only simple sentences—you can make very complex sentences as long as you keep them well organized and punctuated. Herein, three of the top grammatical bugaboos that will get you into trouble with your reader, and how to defeat them.

The key to all of these is ambiguity. Ambiguity is great to have in your writing. Get your reader guessing what you mean. Use words to convey meanings other than their textbook definitions (irony) so your reader has to suss out your real intent. Put a little mystery in the writing. That’s fine. But don’t be grammatically ambiguous. Don’t leave your reader confused and trying to parse your sentence. That’s never a good thing.

Dangling Modifiers

This particular bugaboo was requested specifically by name. What the heck is a dangling modifier and how can I make sure I don’t dangle modifiers all over the place? Generally speaking, you don’t want things just dangling. In writing and in life. Dangling is almost never what you want.

A dangling modifier is a construct of language in which you use a modifier, like an adverb or adjective, but you do not include (or make clear) the subject or object of that modifier. (Clicky for a primer on parts of speech including adverbs and adjectives.) You’ll also sometimes hear these called dangling participles, as most dangling modifiers are participles (but not always).

Take this example:

Going to the beach, ominous clouds began to gather in the sky overhead.

Sorry, are the clouds going to the beach? I forgot to tell you who’s going to the beach, so the only available subject for the verb phrase “going to the beach” is “clouds”—but logically we know the clouds aren’t headed to the beach. 

Here’s another example:

I saw two cows driving down the road.

There’s two things that might be going on here: (1) I was driving down the road and I saw two cows; (2) I saw two cows that were operating a motor vehicle. Maybe one cow operating a motor vehicle and a second cow riding shotgun, or maybe two cows, each operating a separate motor vehicle. Honestly, there’s layers of ambiguity here. 

Most readers, seeing that, will understand that I was the one driving, even though the sentence is technically ambiguous and could mean either thing. Dangling modifiers can be more devious, though. What about this example:

I saw your sister looking through the window.

I am the one looking through the window and seeing your sister? Or am I observing your sister in the act of looking through a window herself? If it matters to your story, you’d better make sure there’s no room for interpretation. Many readers will pass right by this and make an assumption one way or the other. Some readers, though, will notice that it’s unclear and will backtrack over the last few sentences to see if they missed something, some context that makes it obvious. You don’t want your reader doing that.

How do you avoid leaving any wobbly sentence parts awkwardly dangling? The best time to train yourself to find these is during your revision or editing phase. This isn’t something you want to be worried about while you’re drafting, which is when you should just be vomiting words onto paper. Do not stop after every sentence to check whether you have participles flapping in the wind. Tackle this toward the middle or end of your editing phase, when you’re getting down to grammatical brass tacks.

Check your verbs. Every complete sentence has at least one verb. Every verb needs to have a clear originator. Meaning: Every time you use a verb, check to ensure that you have made clear who or what is doing the action. If a sentence has more than one verb, be extra careful. Here are some examples:

• “The ball came flying at my face.” The verb in this sentence is “came.” What came? “The ball.”

• “They went bowling then got dinner.” There are two verbs in this sentence, “went” and “got.” It is clear that both things are being done by “they” because there is no other noun in the sentence that can take an action.

• “We saw two ducks going to the store.” There are two verbs in the sentence, “saw” and “going.” It’s clear that “we” are the ones who did the seeing, but who did the “going”? Was it “the ducks”? Or was it “we”? This one needs clarification.

Grammatical Agreement

This one can mess up even the most educated and seasoned authors. If an editor tells you there’s an agreement issue, don’t worry—it’s probably not a problem with your book contract. If they’re talking about your text they mean there’s a grammatical agreement issue.

In English verbs have to agree with their subject, usually in terms of number. We have it easy because in other languages you have to know the gender of every word so you can make sure the article you associate with it is correct. We don’t have to go through all that. Thankfully. But we do have to make sure our subjects and verbs agree on a few points. And we have to watch our pronouns as well.

Number

The most common disagreement I see (by far) is when grammatical parts don’t agree numerically. Most of the time we intuitively make them agree and it’s very obvious when they don’t, for example:

Those three dogs is fighting with each other.

In General American English, that’s wrong—because dogs is plural, we need to use the plural form of the verb to be, which is are. A word of caution: The above is not universally wrong. General American is not the only valid sociolinguistic American English lect. There are many. Just beware of mistaking one of the many localized American English dialects for an accent. If you want to have your character speak in, for instance, African American Vernacular English or Appalachian English or Cajun French Creole, you need to get it correct without resorting to mimicry.

But if you intended to write the above in General American English, it would be “three dogs are fighting.” Because the subject is plural, the verb must also be plural.

There are a handful of especially tricky instances, so if you wanna be a total agreement pro here they are:

Data

The word data is always plural. The singular form is datum. Any time you use the noun data it should be accompanied by a plural verb: “The data are conclusive.”

None

This is sometimes a contraction of “not one” and in those instances is always singular. “None of the students is going to class tomorrow.” “Is going” in this sentence refers to the action taken by “none” and not “the students”—you can tell because you can take “of the students” out of the sentence and it still means the same thing (“[Not one] is going to class tomorrow”) but you can’t remove “none” (“Of the students is going to class tomorrow”). However, when you take out the clause “of the students,” “none” itself becomes ambiguous: It is no longer clear whether you mean “no one” or “not anyone” is going to class tomorrow or whether you mean “not one” of a set number of people. Ultimately, to be correct you need to specify who or what “none” is: “Nobody is going to class tomorrow.” “No one is going to class tomorrow.” “None of us is going to class tomorrow.”

To know whether you should use a plural or a singular verb with “none,” ask yourself whether it sounds right to replace “none” in your sentence with “not one” or “not any.” “Not any students are going to class tomorrow” sounds uncomfortable while “not one student is going to class tomorrow” sounds correct—so in that instance, “none” means “not one.” Technically, is there anything wrong with saying “not any students are going to class tomorrow?” No, but there are better ways to say it. How about “There is not one donut left” versus “There are not any donuts left”? They’re both correct but most people would probably go with “not any” and so, in that case, if you switch to “none” you’d use a plural verb—“there are none left.”

Gender

Finally, you have to make sure your pronouns agree with their nouns. You can’t mix he, she, and they indiscriminately all willy-nilly like. If you’ve established that someone is “she,” then you cannot turn around and refer to gloves belonging to that character as “his gloves” or “their gloves”—only “her gloves” is correct. If you have a character who uses nonstandard pronouns, you should make that clear before you use a pronoun to refer to that character outside of dialogue. (It’s fine to introduce someone’s pronouns in dialogue.)

Take care when writing about characters whose pronouns are they/them/theirs, as you could accidentally introduce ambiguity if it’s unclear whether an action is being taken by one character whose pronoun is “they” or by multiple characters together—For example, “they went to bed” could refer to a single character or to two or several. This is not at all challenging to include if you write carefully. Make use of character names and descriptive epithets if you have too many “theys” in a row. Don’t put the onus on your reader to sort it out.

I’ve had many people express to me that the use of “they” for a single character is confusing in scenes with many characters all speaking or acting, as it becomes challenging to keep track of so many voices or actors without gender markers. Never forget, there are plenty of books out there with scenes of nothing but men and more men talking to each other and nobody has trouble understanding Moby Dick.

Unclear Antecedents

This one has also been requested by name. It’s not altogether that different from a dangling modifier but it has its own name and special situation so I figured I should cover it. 

In the above paragraph, what was I referring to when I wrote “this one” and “it’s” and “it”? I never told you in the text (though you could guess from the heading). I gave you a bunch of pronouns and a determiner, but I didn’t give you their antecedent.

Earlier in my career, when I was working directly with authors, I took it as a best practice to make brief notes on why I made certain textual changes instead of just dictating. Not so much to educate anybody, but rather to explain the change so that an author, receiving pages of markup, could consider the logic in deciding whether to incorporate my suggestions or not. 

Not every editor (or teacher or professor or any person who delivers feedback on writing) does this, though, and sometimes you just get a request like “need antecedent” and if you’re not an editor, it’s not your job to know what an antecedent is. You’re a genetics researcher or a world-famous pastry chef or a calculus professor or a sociologist or, one time, Pamela Anderson. You have other stuff on your mind. 

If someone asks you to provide an antecedent, they mean you’ve used a pronoun (it’s usually a pronoun) of ambiguous provenance. They are saying they can’t figure out who or what the pronoun represents, for one of three possible reasons. First, because you forgot to mention the antecedent entirely:

They started out by going to the store, then they went to church, and then finally they went back home.

Who is or are “they”? I didn’t give you any clue at all. There’s no antecedent to explain who “they” means. 

Second possibility, your use of the pronoun comes too far away from the mention of the original noun. I see this in scholarly papers: An author will write “Smith et al, in their 1999 paper, discussed [topic]” then go on to discuss the topic at length, sometimes for paragraphs or even pages, before coming back to “they concluded. . . .” Bro, it’s been ten pages. We forgot about Smith et al. Remind us who you mean.

Third possibility, there are  multiple nouns using the same pronoun: 

Sarah and Judith were having a great conversation until they both got pretty tired and bored with each other’s company so, ultimately, she decided to leave.

To make sure you never leave a pronoun un-anteceded, skim your work carefully for pronouns and make sure you’ve introduced the antecedent before you begin using the pronoun. Double check pronoun-heavy passages (especially dialogue exchanges!) and refresh your reader’s memory periodically by restating the antecedent. Mix it up. Don’t keep using pronouns over and over without a break, even if you’ve clearly established who they refer to.

There you go! Everything you need to know to catch the three most common culprits in complex sentence-writing  quandaries. Still not sure whether your sentence passes muster? Stay tuned for a future article on sentence diagramming which is fun but not at all profitable. Actually, “fun” is dubious too. Let me rephrase: A future article on sentence diagramming, a value-neutral thing that exists.

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