Writing Tools

Letters represent sounds. Words are built from letters. A group of words makes a phrase. Add a subject and verb, and you have a clause. If that clause expresses a complete thought, we call it a sentence. But if that clause expresses an incomplete thought, it is called subordinate or dependent, and we have to attach it to a main clause, or it will not be considered Standard English. One complete sentence, or even a fragment or a word, can serve as a paragraph. More often, though, several sentences join together in a paragraph to develop a thesis or idea. And several paragraphs, sometimes many, are required to write an essay, report or chapter for a book. What an amazing process!

Ten sentences form that paragraph, and I wrote it, in part, to illustrate the basic variety of sentence structures. As an experienced reader and writer, I think of these distinctions less often than you might imagine, but they are necessary to produce correct and effective sentences with purposeful punctuation. At a more advanced level, they will provide you some reliable tools to make meaning and tune your style.

I heard a member of Congress complain that headline writers were partly responsible for the failure of recent economic legislation by referring to it as a "bail out" plan. He argued that it should be called a "work out" plan. Another insisted on calling it a "rescue" plan. Once again, political change is bound up in a battle of words.

Remember when opponents of an immigration bill argued that it was an "amnesty" bill? (The word, it turns out, derives from "amnesia," as if illegal immigrants would be pardoned by the government.) First, argued opponents, "secure the borders." And look at the language gulf between "illegal aliens" and "undocumented workers." It almost sounds like the basis of a George Carlin comedy routine.

The term "bail out" has been used over the last few decades to describe government efforts to save a variety of institutions on the brink of financial failure, from Chrysler to New York City to the savings and loan industry.

Gambling is seductive. I learned that lesson the first time my wife and I visited Foxwoods Resort Casino, one of the world's largest, in a cozy wooded town in southern Connecticut. We were playing the quarter slot machines, and Karen won about $25, which came pouring out in that delicious silver cascade of coins. We were hooked. And, of course, we lost it all before we left.

We are like America.

We are a gambling, risk-taking culture, perhaps a product of our frontier origins, where greed overcomes any vestige of Puritan temperance. I've not seen a discussion of how gambling has consumed us in the context of the catastrophic risk-taking that has led America to the brink of economic disaster.

I'm not one of those writers who believe much in the "tortured artist" syndrome. My guess is that depression is as serious a problem for truck drivers as for authors. The culture would be more literate if we helped people escape the notion that good writing requires a dark night of the soul or some agony in the garden.
 
I learned at a party for writers, of all places, that David Foster Wallace, an author I admire, recently committed suicide at the age of 46. Reports say his wife returned to their house in California to find that he had hung himself, a victim of long years of depression and failed treatments.

I had never met Wallace, but we happened to share a publisher, Little, Brown, and a life that involved language, writing and teaching. You could say I looked up to Wallace, or at least to his non-fiction, because his work always challenged me to think harder and to care more deeply. He also offered a strong antidote to the poison of a cynical and self-absorbed culture: To live well, he argued in so many ways, you must get ready to embrace the thing you may now despise.

His case in point was a man named John McCain, a presidential candidate he had chosen to follow and profile in 2000 for Rolling Stone magazine, a piece expanded and republished in his collection "Consider the Lobster." It is a work worth revisiting, not only to mark the passing of an important cultural voice, but to help us all make responsible decisions in the privacy of the voting booth.