CHAPTER XIII

THE CLEAR SENTENCE

BUSINESS men like to talk of brevity. They tell you that a talk or a letter must be brief. What they really mean is that the talk or the letter must be concise; that it must state the business clearly in the fewest possible words. Don't omit any essential fact when you write, but don't repeat. If you can express an idea in ten words, don't use twenty.

In a later exercise we shall meet the sentence, _The size of the crops is always important, and it is especially so to the farmer, and this is because he has to live by the crops._ The writer of that sentence was very careless. He had a good idea and thought that, if he kept repeating it, he would make it stronger. Just the reverse is true. The sentence may be expressed in a very few words: _The size of the crop is vitally important to the farmer._

If you wish to secure conciseness of expression, be especially careful to avoid joining or completing thoughts by these expressions: _and_, _so_, _why_, _that is why_, _this is the reason_, _and everything_.

In this chapter we shall consider some of the larger faults that should be avoided in sentences.

=Exercise 197--Unity of the Sentence=

Give the definition of a sentence.

How many thoughts may one sentence express?

What is likely to happen when two thoughts are joined by _and_? What, then, is the danger in using the compound sentence?

The compound sentence is good to use to express certain ideas, especially contrast; as,

It is not work that kills men; it is worry.

It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction [but it is the friction].

The sentences which most clearly and easily give us one thought are the simple and the complex sentences.

Compare the following sentences. Which of them leave _one_ idea in your mind?

The tongue is a sharp-edged tool.

A sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.

A sharp tongue is like an edged tool, and it grows keener with constant use.

=Exercise 198=

The following is wordy. Rewrite it, condensing as much as possible. Use simple and complex sentences rather than compound, expressing in each only one thought.

In the early summer the corn crop frequently seems to be very poor, and so reports begin to circulate that corn will be high in the autumn, but when the autumn really comes, Wall Street, that great center of business life, begins to see that the reports have been greatly exaggerated and that crops really will be very good, and so business begins to pick up. The size of the crop largely settles the volume of the next season's business, because so great a part of the world's business activity is made up of buying and selling the actual potatoes and corn and wheat and cattle or the products made from these, and when the crop is poor there are a great many people concerned, because they will be poor just as the crops are poor, and this applies to the farmer as well as to the dealer.

The size of the crops is always important, and is especially so to the farmer, and this is because he has to live by the crops. A man may be living in the city and working for a salary and begin to see that his work is not supporting him, and if he is an ambitious man, he will change his occupation. This the farmer cannot do because he has made an enormous investment; in the first place, he has invested in his land, and then in his seed and farm implements, and this investment often means all the available money the farmer has, and often it means a mortgage on his farm. He puts the mortgage on his farm in hope of getting a good crop, and when his hope is not realized, he is in trouble, because he may lose his whole farm if he cannot pay the installments of interest due on his mortgage; but then, on the other hand, if we consider the other side of the question, when the crop is large, the situation is altogether different. Even if the farmer has put a mortgage on his farm, he gets enough money from his produce to pay the debt of that mortgage, and he need not worry how he is to live during the next winter.

The town merchants depend on a good crop, because, if the farmer has not a good return from his fields, he will have almost no ready money, and so he cannot buy much clothing or household furnishings. In Iowa, for instance, there is a little town in the center of a corn-raising community, and it is here that the farmers congregate to do their buying, and in this town there is quite a large department store, and it is run by a woman. She does most of her buying in the autumn and she prefers to do it personally, and so she likes to make a trip to New York for the purpose, but she never sets out until she knows that the corn crop is good. And the reason for this is that she knows that it will cost her hundreds of dollars to make the trip East, to stay at a good hotel, and to spend the requisite length of time choosing her purchases at the different wholesale houses, and she knows that if there is no corn crop she will sell very few coats and hats and lace curtains, and it will never pay her to run up her expenses into the hundreds of dollars, but she will buy as best she can from the drummers, and buy only a little, and thus the size of the crop determines how much the farmer can buy, and, therefore, how much the wholesale and retail dealers can sell.

=Exercise 199--Subordination in the Sentence=

Sentences containing compound predicates may be made more direct in thought if one of the verbs is changed to a participle or an infinitive, because the predicate will then express only one action; as,

1. The carpenter _threw_ down his hammer _and walked_ out of the shop.

2. _Throwing_ down his hammer, the carpenter walked out of the shop.

3. I _went_ downtown _and applied_ for the position.

4. I went downtown _to apply_ for the position.

Change the following sentences so that one action is denoted by the predicate of each:

1. A teamster drove out of the alley east of the theater and swung his horses directly in front of a Madison street car.

2. The tongue struck the front of the car and bored a hole in the fuse box.

3. The fire spread and burned the roof of the car.

4. The half dozen pa.s.sengers were badly frightened and got out quickly.

5. Several people ran and turned in a fire alarm.

6. In a few minutes the fire engines arrived and began to fight the flames.

7. Crowds came from all directions and silently watched the flames.

8. The people poured out of the theater and cheered the firemen.

9. The half dozen pa.s.sengers soon recovered and stood on the curbstone in the crowd.

10. The firemen did their work quickly and departed amid the cheers of the crowd.

=Exercise 200--Combination of Short Sentences=

Sometimes short sentences are bad because two or three of them are needed to express one complete thought. If that is the case, they should be combined, the most important detail being put into the princ.i.p.al clause, and the other details into modifiers, as in the preceding exercise.

Make use of--

1. Adjectives.

2. Adverbs.

3. Participial phrases.

4. Infinitives.

5. Relative p.r.o.nouns.

6. Subordinate conjunctions.

Below, the first and second sentences together make one thought, which is expressed in the third.

John is a good reporter.