THE CLEAR SENTENCE
BUSINESS men like to talk of brevity. They tell you that a talk or a
letter must be brief. What they really mean is that the talk or the
letter must be concise; that it must state the business clearly in the
fewest possible words. Don't omit any essential fact when you write, but
don't repeat. If you can express an idea in ten words, don't use twenty.
In a later exercise we shall meet the sentence, _The size of the crops
is always important, and it is especially so to the farmer, and this is
because he has to live by the crops._ The writer of that sentence was
very careless. He had a good idea and thought that, if he kept repeating
it, he would make it stronger. Just the reverse is true. The sentence
may be expressed in a very few words: _The size of the crop is vitally
important to the farmer._
If you wish to secure conciseness of expression, be especially careful
to avoid joining or completing thoughts by these expressions: _and_,
_so_, _why_, _that is why_, _this is the reason_, _and everything_.
In this chapter we shall consider some of the larger faults that should
be avoided in sentences.
=Exercise 197--Unity of the Sentence=
Give the definition of a sentence.
How many thoughts may one sentence express?
What is likely to happen when two thoughts are joined by _and_? What,
then, is the danger in using the compound sentence?
The compound sentence is good to use to express certain ideas,
especially contrast; as,
It is not work that kills men; it is worry.
It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery,
but the friction [but it is the friction].
The sentences which most clearly and easily give us one thought are the
simple and the complex sentences.
Compare the following sentences. Which of them leave _one_ idea in your
mind?
The tongue is a sharp-edged tool.
A sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows
keener with constant use.
A sharp tongue is like an edged tool, and it grows
keener with constant use.
=Exercise 198=
The following is wordy. Rewrite it, condensing as much as possible. Use
simple and complex sentences rather than compound, expressing in each
only one thought.
In the early summer the corn crop frequently seems to
be very poor, and so reports begin to circulate that
corn will be high in the autumn, but when the autumn
really comes, Wall Street, that great center of
business life, begins to see that the reports have
been greatly exaggerated and that crops really will be
very good, and so business begins to pick up. The size
of the crop largely settles the volume of the next
season's business, because so great a part of the
world's business activity is made up of buying and
selling the actual potatoes and corn and wheat and
cattle or the products made from these, and when the
crop is poor there are a great many people concerned,
because they will be poor just as the crops are poor,
and this applies to the farmer as well as to the
dealer.
The size of the crops is always important, and is
especially so to the farmer, and this is because he
has to live by the crops. A man may be living in the
city and working for a salary and begin to see that
his work is not supporting him, and if he is an
ambitious man, he will change his occupation. This the
farmer cannot do because he has made an enormous
investment; in the first place, he has invested in
his land, and then in his seed and farm implements,
and this investment often means all the available
money the farmer has, and often it means a mortgage on
his farm. He puts the mortgage on his farm in hope of
getting a good crop, and when his hope is not
realized, he is in trouble, because he may lose his
whole farm if he cannot pay the installments of
interest due on his mortgage; but then, on the other
hand, if we consider the other side of the question,
when the crop is large, the situation is altogether
different. Even if the farmer has put a mortgage on
his farm, he gets enough money from his produce to pay
the debt of that mortgage, and he need not worry how
he is to live during the next winter.
The town merchants depend on a good crop, because, if
the farmer has not a good return from his fields, he
will have almost no ready money, and so he cannot buy
much clothing or household furnishings. In Iowa, for
instance, there is a little town in the center of a
corn-raising community, and it is here that the
farmers congregate to do their buying, and in this
town there is quite a large department store, and it
is run by a woman. She does most of her buying in the
autumn and she prefers to do it personally, and so she
likes to make a trip to New York for the purpose, but
she never sets out until she knows that the corn crop
is good. And the reason for this is that she knows
that it will cost her hundreds of dollars to make the
trip East, to stay at a good hotel, and to spend the
requisite length of time choosing her purchases at the
different wholesale houses, and she knows that if
there is no corn crop she will sell very few coats and
hats and lace curtains, and it will never pay her to
run up her expenses into the hundreds of dollars, but
she will buy as best she can from the drummers, and
buy only a little, and thus the size of the crop
determines how much the farmer can buy, and,
therefore, how much the wholesale and retail dealers
can sell.
=Exercise 199--Subordination in the Sentence=
Sentences containing compound predicates may be made more direct in
thought if one of the verbs is changed to a participle or an infinitive,
because the predicate will then express only one action; as,