Life under a glass jar

A sentence is not the smallest unit of writing, but it is the smallest unit of writing that points to something greater than itself. A letter is just a squiggle on the page, and a word is a hieroglyph waiting to be deciphered. But a sentence – a sentence is where things start to get interesting 

Formally, it’s nothing special. A sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a full-stop, and always contains a subject and predicate (well, almost always). What could be simpler? But this definition only gets us so far. It’s a bit like describing the circuitry of the ARP 2600 synthesizer without mentioning the incredible sounds it produces – kind of interesting if you’re into vintage analogue synths, but not much use for the rest of us. A sentence isn’t just a grammatical accomplishment; it’s also an invitation to listen, and to feel, with others.

There’s a prism-like beauty to every well-wrought sentence, a line of text that refracts a world of meaning. A sentence, for Geraldine Woods, is ‘a literary universe in a grain of sand’ (2020: xiii). And that’s why we should learn how to write good ones: so we can capture a part of life under a glass jar and let the reader inspect it as closely as possible. 

But in academic writing, the glass is sometimes so cloudy we can barely see what’s on the other side. Even if we squint, we’re unsure what we’re supposed to be looking at. There’s an irony here. Academics dedicate their lives to research, yet it often feels as if they don’t care whether or not they communicate their hard-won findings to anyone else. Take this example from the journal Management Research Review: 

From the variation of the data, it can be said that the two stakeholder groups, governments and NGOs, require to be reviewed separately. While the standpoint of corporations seems to be similar in respect of the need-to-be-supportive governmental role, the polarization between LMEs and CMEs concerning the role of NGOs is evident. Also the government role potentially shows different approaches in LMEs and CMEs. It is not significant enough to confirm the hypothesis that there is a different CSR mind-set regarding the role of governments in CMEs and LMEs, but the nuances still show a divergent trend. (Esken, et al., 2018) 

The passage commits a multitude of stylistic sins. The subject of each sentence is abstract (it, the polarization, the government role, the nuances); the verbs are unimaginative (can be said, is, shows, is, show); the acronyms are confusing (NGOs, LMEs, CMEs, CSR); and the authors hedge their bets at every turn (can be said, seems to be, potentially shows). Even if you know something about the topic, the text is pretty difficult to decode. The authors are investigating whether managers in liberal market economies like Canada and the US have a different attitude towards corporate social responsibility than managers in centralized market economies like Germany and the Netherlands. But it’s fair to assume you wouldn’t pick any of that up from the passage alone. 

The second sentence is a puzzle in itself. There are a few reasons for that, but one sticks out: it takes too damn long to get to the main verb. In fact, we have to read almost to the end before we find out what the sentence actually wants to tell us. While the standpoint of corporations seems to be similar in respect of the need-to-be-supportive governmental role (subordinate clause), the polarization between LMEs and CMEs concerning the role of NGOs (subject) is (main verb – finally!) evident. Reading this sentence is like holding your breath under water when all you want to do is take a gulp of fresh air. 

The main verb is the most important part of a sentence, the part that lets the reader know what the rest of the sentence is about. The verb brings the characters to life and sets the story in motion. And the quicker we get to it, the better – otherwise it’s just some people standing around, scratching their heads, waiting for something to happen. So introduce the main verb as soon as possible and get the action going. Check it out: 

Managers in liberal market economies view the role of NGOs in a different way than managers in centralized market economies, even though both groups view the role of governments in exactly the same way – namely, to support corporations.

Not perfect, but certainly an improvement. We start with the subject (managers in liberal market economies), immediately followed by the main verb (view). At the outset, we know who the characters are and what they are doing. The rest of the sentence provides detail, shading, nuance. The sentence can continue indefinitely and the reader will never get lost because the verb provides a path to follow.

Think of writing as a kind of wayfinding. Don’t make the reader hack their way through the underbrush; tramp it down for them so they can find their way to a clearing – what Heidegger calls Lichtung, or a space in which meaning appears. That, surely, is the point of any sentence.