A Word, Please: Using subordinates, you can bury main clauses

By June Casagrande

April 22, 2016 6:14 PM PT

If you ever want to clear a room, a single word will usually do the trick: grammar. For anyone who had a hypercritical English teacher or a particularly persnickety aunt — and that’s a lot of us — the word conjures up some pretty unpleasant associations: sharp criticisms for using “me” in place of “I,” a poor grade on a paper for ending a sentence with a preposition.

Pity.

These experiences leave people with a lifelong belief that grammar is all about writing properly. So they never learn grammar’s best-kept secret: It’s really about writing well.

Take, for example, the following sentence. It’s based on a passage penned by a friend who had asked me to help make it better: “Wilson eventually became a resident of the Rio Lindo area when he, at last, found a community in which the arrival of 30,000 residents over the past year was creating a vibrant and bustling arts scene.”

It’s not the worst sentence in the world. It’s grammatical and logical. But it’s not great. Most of us read sentences like this every day, never struggling with them but, at the same time, never stopping to notice that we’re just not as drawn into the story as we could be.

If you want to do better, grammar is your friend. Grammar, which is really just sentence mechanics, highlights the basic units of sentences: clauses. A clause is a team formed by a subject and a verb working together. Sentences can have more than one clause, and those clauses can relate to each other in different ways.

Some are equal, like “I enjoy watching television and I enjoy going to the movies.” These are called coordinate clauses. But some clauses are subordinate to others, like “Because I enjoy watching television, I rarely go to the movies.” In this sentence, the part before the comma is a subordinate clause because it can’t stand on its own as a sentence. The stuff after the comma could stand alone. But the subordinating conjunction “because” renders that first part a mere accessory to the main clause.

The effect is subtle but powerful: By subordinating a clause, you signal to the reader “This part isn’t important. The meaty stuff’s in that other clause, the main clause.”

A simple example drives this point home. Imagine you came across this sentence in a crime novel. “After shooting his business partner in the face, dragging his bloody corpse down the alley and hoisting it into a dumpster, Joe realized he was tired.”

Notice all the exciting action in this sentence: A guy shoots another guy in the face, smears blood everywhere while he’s dragging him down an alley, then hoists the dead guy into a trash receptacle. Yet what’s the main clause of our sentence? It’s not about shooting or dragging or hoisting. It’s the snooze-worthy “Joe realized.”

There’s a grammar term for this: upside-down subordination. It means you inadvertently highlighted the wrong information and threw a wet blanket the good stuff.

Our sentence about Wilson is more complicated, but once you start thinking about clauses in this way, you can see a lot of ways to make this sentence better.

Its main clause, “Wilson became,” is boring compared with other stuff going on here. The stuff in the subordinate clause — the part that begins with the subordinating conjunction “when” — seems more visual and kinetic to me: 30,000 people moved to the area in a single year and transformed it into a bustling arts scene.

So perhaps, I told my friend, the stuff in the subordinate clause could get a promotion: “Nearly 30,000 settlers had flocked to the Rio Lindo area in the past year alone, transforming the sleepy farmland into a bustling arts scene. It was just the place for Wilson.”

Of course, this is just one way to tackle this sentence. There are plenty of others. And when you start paying attention to clauses and how they relate to each other, you start seeing lots of options.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.