how to revise a sentence #3
I want to make the following sentence more fluid by removing its commas, but they are preventing ambiguity:
Vague memories, without any obvious relevance to what I was witnessing, bubbled into my conscious mind.
Without the second comma, the reader could initially read bubbled as a continuation of I was witnessing, before realizing that bubbled is actually a continuation of Vague memories. (Upon reflection, I realize this ambiguity is at least in part a symptom of the distance between the main subject and its verb.) Even mild confusion forces the reader to withdraw attention from the text and mentally iron out the wrinkle before they can continue reading. They might even have to re-read the sentence to straighten it out.
This, in my opinion, is unforgivable in good writing. Writers must work hard to remove all practical obstacles preventing a smooth reading experience, and only rarely subject the reader to this sort of interruption. To resolve this particular instance, I could restructure the sentence to connect Vague memories with its verb bubbled. The default, easy option is this:
Vague memories bubbled into my conscious mind without any obvious relevance to what I was witnessing.
But I prefer this one:
Into my awareness bubbled vague memories without any obvious relevance to what I was witnessing.
It enlivens the bubbling image by giving it more motion, which serves the spontaneity that the sentence is trying to convey. Also, it makes the content more fun to read by contributing variety of sentence structure to its containing passage:
The ongoing match had a dreamlike quality. Into my awareness bubbled vague memories without obvious relevance to what I was witnessing. Times I’d played soccer before, hazy but unignorable recollections of past situations on the field.
There’s also an opportunity to make the sentence more precise by using with no instead of without any:
Into my awareness bubbled vague memories
without anywith no obvious relevance to what I was witnessing.
I think it is more natural to read with no as relating to memories. In contrast, without can sound like I’m going to say without warning or something else describing the phenomenon of memories appearing rather than the memories themselves. We could also use of no, but it also adds a new split second of ambiguity when placed next to vague memories since it sounds like I’m going to say memories of some past event. Also an option is that had no, but it’s clunky.
It’s tempting to dismiss all this as overthinking, but precision requires finetuning. A major task of writing is tweaking in response to what we anticipate the reader will experience. We do this based on our intuition as readers ourselves, not on measurements and objective criteria. That’s what makes writing art as opposed to science. (Though I think a scientific, databased approach to writing could be both revolutionary and scandalous.) We readers involuntarily predict what word will come next, so we writers must anticipate their anticipations.
There is at least one writing principle to take from all this: manage ambiguity in your writing so that the intended meaning is obvious to the reader. This sounds like a platitude, but it requires discipline that much writing doesn’t keep. Specifically, a writer should strive to make a reader’s first interpretation of a sentence easy to make, correct, and hard to doubt. A reader will disengage with your work if they lose too much faith in your competence as a writer.
Verlyn Klinkenborg’s
Several Short Sentences About WritingSeveral Short Sentences About Writing (2012)
by Verlyn Klinkenborg
This is my second review of this book. I have to say – it won me over, big time. This time I read a physical copy, and it was worth it. The spacing and formatting of the print gives the book a mysterious aura. You feel you’re conferring secretly with the author about a strange magic that hides in prose. He reveals what he’s learned about teasing this elusive substance into the right configurations. In the same words he explains to you and shows you. Some books about writing are sterile and tedious, but this book is on the other end of the spectrum.
Some of its advice has lodged into my writing brain:
Keep the space between sentences as empty as possible… Most sentences need no preamble - nor postlude.
Avoid writing your sentence. Play with it in your head. The range of possible sentence structures narrows after every word you put down.
Don’t be afraid that you’ll forget a good sentence or a good idea. Trust yourself. If it is important, you’ll remember it.
Lots of worthwhile ideas, many of which aim to loosen rigid rules and challenge habits taught in school. Are transition words and sentences really necessary? Do you trust your reader so little? You can get anywhere from anywhere. It also challenges conventional wisdom regarding “inspiration”, “natural” writing, and “flowing” writing. It gives interesting writing exercises like putting sentences each on their own line to compare structure, length, and rhythm.
I realized on second read that the author asserts in the introduction that this book is not dogma, but a collection of starting points. Also, my prayers were answered: the book contains a healthy share of sample prose.
Very glad I came across this book.
has a great section discussing Some Practical Problems in sentences written by “excellent college students who went on to be very good writers.” He explains why he doesn’t give his students the benefit of the doubt regarding discrepancies and imprecisions:
[You] can only judge [a writer’s] intentionality in context. If all the sentences in a piece are clear and sharp, then perhaps—perhaps!—we can say that a slightly aberrant sentence is intentional, if there seems to be a reason for it. But if many of the sentences in a piece are unclear, ambiguous, or weak, we have to assume that intention is irrelevant— indiscernible at best. We have to assume the writer lacks control.
And who wants to follow someone who doesn’t seem to know the way?