CLAUSE AND EFFECT: The subtleties of subordination, coordination, and reduction

Children don't subordinate much.

     This blog post deals with a subtle concept important to thoughtful and skilled writers. It is for fairly “advanced” writers, I suppose, although I’ve discovered that students as young as 14 get the concept pretty quickly.

     Consider the following passage (part of a longer story I'll share later):

This happened in June. We had an accident. We had a dog named Andy. He weighed 55 pounds. He was only 18 months old. He was a blue heeler. Blue heelers are sometimes called Australian cattle dogs. We liked Andy. He was too wild. He was too energetic. He needed lots of company. We worked all day. We weren’t home. We had to keep him tied up. We kept him in the yard. We don’t have a fenced yard. Andy was sometimes lonesome.

     This, more or less, is how young children talk or write, although perhaps they would pin the word “and” breathlessly to the beginning of each sentence.

     What’s the problem here? What makes the passage seem so immature? It’s not just that all the sentences are short and therefore lack sentence variety (although that is a problem). It’s not just that the rhythm of the writing is what most people would call “choppy” (although that, too, is a problem).

     No, there is a deeper failure here: The writer doesn’t seem able to distinguish between more important facts and less important ones. Each sentence in the passage contains one fact. Each fact, conversely, gets a whole sentence. In the passage, we are being whacked with identically emphasized facts, as if a fly swatter were smacking us at each period. “Choppy”? Indeed. What’s being chopped up here is the thinking itself.

     The problem is that the writer has failed to apply the principles of subordination, coordination, and reduction.

     Here’s the basic principle: Good writers put their most important ideas in the main clauses of sentences; they put less important ideas in subordinate clauses or phrases, or even reduce them to just a word or two. To suggest that two ideas are of equal weight, the good writer puts them in equivalent grammatical forms (e.g., two independent clauses or two prepositional phrases).

      Look again at the passage about Andy the dog. Think for a moment: how should it be rewritten? I’ll wait. . . . (Teachers: This is a good time to have each of your students try his or her own rewrite.)

Blue heelers are great cattle dogs, but it's hard to subordinate them.

      Okay, I’ll admit it. That was a trick question. There is no one way the passage should be rewritten. How you rewrite it depends altogether on how much stress you want each idea to get. Here’s one possible rewrite:

In June our dog Andy caused an accident. A “blue heeler” or “Australian cattle dog,” Andy weighed 55 pounds and was only 18 months old. We liked Andy, but he was too wild, energetic, and sociable. Because we were away at work all day and our yard isn’t fenced, we kept Andy tied up in the yard. Andy was sometimes lonesome.

    In this rewritten version, the main clause of the first sentence is “Andy caused an accident.” The accident and Andy’s role as the cause gets the emphasis here. The date of the event and Andy’s name are “reduced” in the sentence to a brief prepositional phrase (“in June”) and a simple one-word appositive (“Andy”). Don’t worry if you don’t understand these technical grammatical terms. The point is, the facts of the date and name get less grammatical “weight” than what’s in the main clause. They no longer get a whole sentence each. The fact that Andy caused an accident is what this rewrite wants you to see as important.

      In the rewrite, the main clause of the second sentence is “Andy. . . weighed 55 pounds and was only 18 months old.” Here, obviously, Andy’s size and age are emphasized, while his breed is reduced to a brief appositive (“a ‘blue heeler’ or ‘Australian cattle dog’”). The third sentence has two main clauses: “We liked Andy” and “he was too wild, energetic, and sociable.” The fact that they are in “equal” independent clauses suggests that these two ideas somehow are meant to balance each other: our liking him balanced against his wild energy and need for attention. ("But" is a "coordinating" conjunction, joining equal-weight ideas.) In the rewrite, it takes the three adjectives—“wild,” “energetic” and “sociable”—to balance our liking; in the original version, they got three whole sentences—far outweighing our one sentence of liking Andy.

      In the rewrite, the fourth sentence has as its main clause “we kept Andy tied up.” Where he was tied up is now reduced to a short prepositional phrase (“in the yard”). Why he was tied up “because we were away at work all day and our yard isn’t fenced” is put into a subordinate clause, slightly less important than the fact that he was tied up. Note that “we were away” and “our yard isn’t fenced” are both equal subject-verb elements, implying that they were equally important in our decision to tie up Andy. The subordinate conjunction “because” of course serves another important purpose: It clarifies how the ideas in the different short sentences of the original are related; there’s cause-and-effect at work here. Good subordination, coordination, and reduction makes not just the relative importance of ideas clear, but also the relationships among ideas.

      The last sentence of the rewrite remains the same: “Andy was sometimes lonesome.” When you give an idea a sentence all its own like this—especially a short sentence—it acquires very strong emphasis. Obviously, in this version of the rewrite, Andy’s lonesomeness is going to be an important part of the story.

      Now try rewriting the original passage a different way, with different emphasis. For example, what if the first sentence was “It was June when the accident happened”? Notice how suddenly the time of the accident becomes emphasized. What if the next sentence were “Our 55-pound dog Andy was a blue heeler—an Australian shepherd dog.” Now his breed gets much more attention from your reader, and it will probably play a bigger role in the story.

      And so on.

      The reason children write and speak like the passage that began this post is that they lack the verbal skills to subordinate and reduce lesser ideas, coordinate equal ideas, and save their main ideas for main clauses. It’s a skill most of us take for granted and become remarkably good at as we grow older.

     I don’t wish to make you too self-conscious about your writing. Please don’t worry every sentence to death as you try to decide which ideas to subordinate, coordinate, or reduce. Generally you’ll do this pretty well by instinct. But, occasionally, you’ll read a paragraph you’ve written and think to yourself, “Something’s not right here. I’m not really making my point the way I want to.” That’s when you might try revising the way you subordinate or coordinate ideas to see what happens. Remember the concepts of subordination, coordination, and reduction; they are effective tools in the sophisticated writer’s workshop.

     For the full story of Andy and the accident, go to this link. The story is written entirely in “children’s” prose. Teachers: It can be a useful homework assignment to have your students rewrite the whole story and compare their rewrites.

The great nonfiction writer John McPhee.

(Note: The great nonfiction writer John McPhee writes long, beautifully organized and splendidly crafted books. I once saw his writing process described. I think it goes like this: he writes a single fact on a 3 X 5 notecard—just one fact per card. Then he writes another fact on another card, and so on. For a 500-page book, he might have 100,000 notecards. Then he arranges the notecards in the order he wants and begins composing sentences. I like to imagine him deciding which facts to subordinate, which to coordinate, which to reduce. It must be a fascinating process. Please read one of his books. Go here to find the list.)