smart moves for style and clarity

The two essential elements of sentences are like the engine and transmission of your car’s drivetrain. Without them, the rubber of meaning doesn't get to the road.  

What are these elements and why should writers care?
 

The flow of thought and experience

We organize thought and experience in terms of doers that are doing something, of things that are engaged in actions. We must have both, the doer and the doing, in order to make meaning flow. 

We cannot comprehend someone who tries to describe a workday in terms of doers only – breakfast, car, computer, report. Nor can we make sense of a string of doing words only – eat, drive, fail, write. A doer and a doing are necessary for meaning to flow in a sentence – breakfast was cold, the car had a flat, the computer failed and she wrote the report.
 

The doer of a sentence is also known as the subject, and it is necessarily a person, place, or thing. In other words, the subject must come from the class of words known as nouns and pronouns.
 

The doing words that express the doer’s action are verbs. The particular verb that engages a sentence’s subject is the predicate. Without a subject and predicate, we cannot decode the meaning of a sentence. Our brains instinctively search first for these elements in order to process language.
 

These two elements are like the engine and transmission of a car’s drivetrain. Without the engine, there is no power; without the transmission, the power doesn’t get to the wheels.        

In a similar way, the drivetrain of a sentence is the subject and predicate bolted together. Without them there can be no movement, no meaning. All the other words – no matter how long or complicated the sentence – are dependent on the subject or the predicate. It is an astonishingly simple system yet it powers countless sentence patterns.

Writers select their subjects and predicates with care because the choice allows them to dial in the focus. Like a movie cameraman working through the shots of an unfolding scene, the writer positions some things and actions in the foreground (i.e., within the subject/predicate core) and others in the background (outside the core).
 

Writers also pay attention to the slots that subjects and predicates occupy in sentences because these are a basis of style. How the writer chooses to slot words before, in between, and after the subject/predicate core impacts variety and emphasis. It also controls the all-important beginning and end of sentences, which are key positions of natural emphasis and of transitions to neighboring sentences.  Ω

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Related article  To highlight strong modifiers while revising, read Make the Most of Modifiers.