smart moves for style and clarity

It’s not only the words that you choose as modifiers but where you put them in a sentence. Some sentence slots draw special attention to modifiers, provide a better link to a neighboring sentence, or make a string of modifiers particularly effective.  

For example, in English the modifiers known as adjectives routinely occupy the slot immediately before the nouns that they modify. However, writers often have options to move these modifiers into other slots. 

Consider this example where the modifier exhausted has a different position in each version of the same basic sentence:

               1. The exhausted boy fell to the ground on his knees.

               2.  Exhausted, the boy fell to the ground on his knees.

               3.  The boy fell to the ground on his knees, exhausted.

In the first sentence, exhausted is directly in front of boy, the routine position for such modifiers. But within the same basic structure, it can also appear at the sentence’s beginning or end. Initial and final sentence slots are places of natural emphasis for all kinds of words. 

In the following sentences, similar sentence slots are available for the two modifiers, plump and pale:
 

               1.  Her plump, pale lips curled into a pout.
               2.  Plump and pale, her lips curled into a pout.
               3.  Her lips curled into a pout, plump and pale.

As was the case with the earlier example, the first version has the two modifiers in the routine position directly in front of the modified word (lips). The other options are again the beginning or end of the sentence. But in the third version, did you notice that the two modifiers are closer to the noun pout than to lips? As a result, plump and pale might be understood as modifying pout rather than lips, but the difference in meaning is minor because pout and lips are near equivalents in this sentence.

When readers decode sentences, they attach the meaning of modifiers to the nearest word or words that they can sensibly modify. Sometimes a sentence will be awkward or ambiguous if a modifier is positioned far away from what it is modifying. In the next example, the modifiers deep and dangerous sound fine modifying currents in the routine and initial slots, but in the final slot they sound clumsy because they are far from currents and they cannot sensibly modify the nearby noun lives:  
 

        1.  The deep and dangerous currents around the jetty had claimed several swimmers’ lives.
        2.  Deep and dangerous, the currents around the jetty had claimed several swimmers’ lives.
        3.  The currents around the jetty had claimed several swimmers’ lives, deep and dangerous.

And in this sentence, which word is being modified by aloof?

            The chairman fidgeted with his gold pen while the vice president took notes, aloof.

The modifier is closest to vice president, who seems preoccupied by his note taking. Meanwhile, the chairman fidgets with his gold pen, so perhaps he is the aloof one. If so, the adjective should be moved closer to him. Another alternative is turning the sentence inside-out, a simple trick that can fix many different kinds of problems in sentences: 

             While the vice president took notes during the meeting, the chairman fidgeted with his gold

             pen, aloof.
 

The edit makes it clear that the chairman is aloof, and if he is the writer’s primary focus, putting him at the sentence’s conclusion is a natural fit.
 

In this last example, note the balance created by positioning three modifiers at the beginning of the first sentence and three at the end of the following sentence, creating a bookended pair:
 

            Shrill, brash, confident, Geoff left with his unit for a tour of duty in Afghanistan. The

            following summer he returned detached, subdued, cautious.
 

The distance between the two groups of modifiers seems to reflect the distance that Geoff traveled on his tour of duty.  

Be alert to the possibilities of moving modifiers – as well as other words in sentences – into nonroutine slots. This tactic can highlight a well-chosen word and avoid monotony in sentence structure. Just be aware of possible ambiguity if your modifiers can attach themselves to more than one word within a sentence.  Ω    

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Related article   For Emphasis, Shuffle the Word Order