Ink Tea Stone Leaf

It should not be surprising to say that most high school students are not excellent writers. Most of them won’t have opportunities to get very much better at it when they aren’t students anymore, either. Many people tasked with writing anything of length seem to struggle with the organization of ideas into a logical progression. Others do alright for the most part, but still stumble into awkwardness at the most inopportune times. My observations have led me to believe that most people do not understand written language in a systematic way, and do not understand the way that each unit of their composition, no matter the scale, has the effect of either supporting or undermining the structure of the whole. This cuts in both directions: a reader who does not perceive the overall structure of a text will struggle to decode and retain its meaning.

This week, I wrote a little piece about writing on a seldom-used white board in the tutorial room. The piece started like this:

Written language has structure at every level, from word to complete essay/book/piece. Structure creates meaning. Understanding structure creates comprehension.

From there, I gave some annotated examples of how structure is manifested at different levels of writing. Due to space and time constraints, I was limited to three levels: word, sentence, and paragraph. Since there is much more space here, I’d like to elaborate for the benefit of any young students of writing who may have wandered onto this blog (as well as correct some mortifying, dunder-headed errors I made in the whiteboard draft, but I’m not telling you what they are).

Going forward, I will assume a general familiarity with the vocabulary of writing and grammar (but if I use any unfamiliar words, there is a wonderful dictionary for you to consult right here). This piece is not meant to be the definitive statement of how language (either written or spoken) is structured, because that is an ongoing, complex, and controversial discussion. It only represents my own thoughts on the matter, as simply as I can convey them, which I have found to be useful in making my own writing clearer and in creating space for my natural voice to express itself. I hope you will find it so, and come away with a new appreciation for writing and for your own ability to write.

Written Language

First, on the nature of writing: it is an unfortunate misconception in literate societies that “words” are fundamentally composed of letters and other characters placed in a prescribed order and associated with a prescribed pronunciation. Words are not nearly so neat. At its core, a word is a sound that is regarded as meaning something, while the precise nature of both sound and meaning are constantly renegotiated between speakers. (With regard to sign languages, the same thing is true, except that the words are composed of observable movements rather than sounds; additionally, observable movements may alter the perceived meaning of spoken words as well).

“Language” and words (spoken or signed) were probably not a deliberate human invention, but an evolved behavior that became increasingly sophisticated over millions of years. By contrast, writing is a deliberate invention; we know almost exactly when and where it came into existence, although this occurred in multiple places and times. It has a specific purpose: recording the words which convey meaning, so that they can be accurately recalled and understood at a later date. It’s not a perfect invention, as languages change over time and the meanings understood by certain sounds are not stable. It is a very successful invention nonetheless, because through writing we can know today the substance of many (though not all) thoughts and speeches made thousands of years ago.

There are many approaches to writing, the most familiar to English speakers being alphabetic. In this approach, the main purpose of the characters (known mostly as letters) is to reconstruct the “phonemes” of a word, that is the key sounds that distinguish one word from another, in order that they may be pronounced accurately when read aloud (a process commonly known as “spelling”). If you encountered a written language with words like pito, zito, fito, wito, nito, tito, and yito, you might not know what they meant, but you could at least infer that they rhyme.

Given a limited set of letters, it is not as easy as it might seem to come up with a system where phonemes and letters correspond in a perfectly predictable way, and virtually all alphabetically-written languages fail at least in a few cases. English is often mocked for the bizarre nature of many of its standard spellings, but it is much more predictable than not, and a truly random alphabet would be almost useless.

Alphabets focus on strings of phonemes, but a word is not just a string of phonemes; a word is a sound. To understand the difference, consider this answer to the question of what is for lunch in the cafeteria today.

Corn dogs

Spoken and written language are equally suited to communicating which variety of food will be served. However, the sound of the spoken utterance “corn dogs” is not just the phonemes that make it up. It can be delivered at any volume, from a whisper to a shout; it can be delivered in earnest, sarcastic, elated, celebrative, disappointed, devastated, disbelieving, ironic, uncertain, embarassed, or boastful tones of voice; it can be spoken with a funny accent, a dull monotone, or complete neutrality. All of these things affect the meaning of the sound, as it is intended by the speaker and understood by the listener.

English writing can suggest some of these variations through punctuation, in standard and sort-of standard ways:

Corn dogs.

Corn dogs!

Corn dogs?

“Corn dogs”

Corn dogs…

CORN DOGS

Corn dogs

Furthermore, people love coming up with creative, non-standard ways to communicate tone through writing:

*corn dogs*

Cooooorn dogs

Corn dooooogs

CoRn DoGs

*C*o*r*n*d*o*g*s*

Corn dogs 💩

The problem is that the standard punctuation is limited to suggesting certain kinds of tone without indicating precisely which one; is “Corn dogs!” a happy or angry sound, and if it’s angry, exactly how angry is it? And as for non-standard approaches, they may convey what seems like a very precise tone among a select group, but the fact that they are non-standard means they may fail to be understood outside of that group. There are simply too many variations in the way people use tone to expect our writing system to represent it as well as it does phonemes.

Because written language is less equipped to communicate tone of voice, in many circumstances it is less efficient than spoken language. When the intention of writing is to be clearly understood (and it isn’t always, but it often is), then it is necessary for writing to make itself clear in another way: by presenting itself in a logical and effective structure.

Spoken language is not less structured than written language; it is only structured differently, in a way that uses tone and other context clues to allow for greater flexibility. Effective writing often has to be more structurally formal than effective speaking, but the underlying purpose of the structure is the same: to turn sound (or in the case of writing, the abstract visual representation of sound) into meaning.

Word

Reorganized

There are many ways to talk about the structure of a word. Understood as a sequence of phonemes, “reorganized” is a set of approximately ten sounds in a specific order*. That order determines the way they are typically pronounced; say it slowly, and you may realize that the first “r” is not precisely identical to the second, and that the final “d” would sound more like a “t” if that “z” had been a “c” instead. Pronunciation is always a little variable, but to communicate the intended meaning, it’s generally necessary to get as many of those sounds correct as possible.

*that is if you speak English like a Californian, as I do.

Another way to look at the structure of the word is morphological. You can see the word “reorganized” as a composite of several units of meaning, or morphemes. The root of the word is “organize;” a close look at this word with knowledge of its etymology and history will tell you that it contains two basic elements, the word “organ” (from the Latin organum) and the verb element “-ize.” Combining these morphemes creates the sense of placing things into their proper places in a system, just like organs in a body. You might not be aware of the Latin etymology, but you have probably noticed that a lot of verbs that have to do with applying some sort of process end with “-ize,” and this gives you a clue as to the kind of meaning that “organize” carries.

There are two other morphemes in “reorganized.” The first is the prefix “re-,” which modifies the verb with the sense of an action repeated or done over—to reorganize is to organize again. The second is the suffix “-ed,” spelled with just the “d” here because the silent “e” at the end of the root makes the silent “e” of “-ed” unnecessary (you may have noticed that the “e” of the “-ed” suffix is almost always silent, unless the word it is being attached to ends with a “t” or “d,” as in the words “pitted” or “loaded”).

The meaning carried by the “-ed” suffix is that the act of reorganization was accomplished in the past, but its precise meaning can vary depending on context. It could be the simple past tense of the verb, as in “I reorganized my desk.” In combination with an auxiliary verb it could also be a past participle, as in “I have reorganized my desk.” And like many past participles, it can be used as an adjective indicating a certain state of being, as in “I put my feet on the reorganized desk.” The only way to know which of these meanings is intended is to look at the word within the next level of structure: the phrase, or sentence.

Sentence

The student’s notes were easier to read after they were reorganized.

With the word now placed in a sentence, it has a less ambiguous purpose. Paired with the auxiliary verb “were,” “reorganized” is a participle associated with the state of the sentence’s subject. Wonderful! This realization is possible because of the coordination between the structural elements at one level (the morphemes that make up the word) and another level (the position of the word within the sentence where it is found).

We could dive into the structure of the phonemes and morphemes of each individual word, but at this point I want to talk about the structures that exist between and among words, and which consequently develop the meanings of the words into a deeper meaning expressed by the sentence.

There are rules about what kinds of words can be combined in which ways. Different kinds of words are known as word classes, or “the parts of speech,” and include classes like nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. In the abstract, a word (as a specific sequence of phonemes) can actually belong to more than one class; “face” is both a noun and a verb, for example. But when a word is actually used in a sentence, it can only belong to one class at a time. In the sentence “you face his face,” the first “face” is one hundred percent a verb, and the second is thoroughly a noun.

Words combine into units of varying sizes and complexity. The smallest combination is a phrase, where two or more words merge into a unit that can be treated as a sort of mega-word. Phrases defined by nouns, like “lost puppy” (an adjective and a noun) or “king of the birds”(a noun, a preposition, an article, and another noun) are noun phrases, which can be substituted whole for single nouns without disturbing the grammar of the sentence. Similarly, a verb phrase incorporates verbs with words of other classes, such as “tie the knot” (a verb, an article, and a noun) or “come in last place” (a verb, a preposition, an adjective, and a noun). The exact boundaries of phrases is inexact and often overlapping; for example, in this sentence:

Red and the Blue Velvets came in last place.

“Red and the Blue Velvets” is a noun phrase, which also contains the noun phrase “the Blue Velvets” within it. Meanwhile, “came in last place” is a verb phrase which contains the prepositional phrase “in last place,” which in turn contains the noun phrase “last place.”

We are not conscious of the process when we speak, particularly when we speak in our native languages, but the part of our brains that “knows” how to speak that language also “knows” exactly what a noun, verb, etc. is, and it “knows” which words in your vocabulary belong to which categories, and it knows all of the ways that you can combine them so that whatever you say will mean something to the person you are listening to. Your brain is an automatic phrase-builder, at least when it comes to speaking or signing. But writing is not automatic; writing is an artificial process that approximates the expressiveness of language. Therefore, while most people give little thought to the structure of phrases when they are talking, they usually find they must think harder about those structures when they write in order to maintain the same level of clarity.

Words and phrases form the constituent parts of sentences, which are (once again) tricky to define precisely. We can say that, generally, the purpose of a sentence is to communicate information about a subject (or more than one): what it is, what it does, what it is like, where it’s going, so on and so forth. Traditionally, the information pertaining to the subject is known as the predicate, and both subjects and predicates can be expressed by single words or by one or more phrases.

Returning to the sentence at the beginning of this section:

The student’s notes were easier to read after they were reorganized.

There are a few ways to take apart the structure of this sentence. First, it can be divided in two, because it actually contains two subject/predicate pairs: “the student’s notes were easier to read” and “they were reorganized,” linked by the word “after,” which is used in this case as a conjunction. Each instance of a subject/predicate combination is called a clause, and sentences can consist of one clause or many. Different kinds of clauses can be distinguished and I don’t wish to go through all of them because I definitely don’t know all their names. I will just note that in the example sentence, the two clauses are called independent clauses, because although I have conjoined them with a conjunction, they could have been complete sentences all on their own. Two (or more) independent clauses joined in this way are called a compound sentence.

So why combine them, rather than leave them separate?

The student’s notes were easier to read. They were reorganized.

It should be plain that with this separation, the words don’t mean exactly the same thing. The original sentence establishes a chronology for the two actions, and suggests that one is the cause of the other. This is a possible meaning of the two clauses in separation, but it is not necessarily an obvious one. The intended meaning only emerges through the coordination of three elements: the two clauses, and the conjunction “after.”

With some rearrangement, it is possible to get the same meaning (or close to it) from two separate sentences:

The student’s notes were reorganized. Afterward, they were easier to read.

Since “the student’s notes” and “they” refer to the same subject, it is possible to swap their predicates so that they fall into chronological order. To make certain that they are interpreted chronologically, however, it is necessary to insert “afterward,” an adverb that modifies the verb phrase “were easier to read” to define its place in the chronology. One way or another, if we want to guarantee the intended meaning, that there is a connection between the reorganization of the notes and the increase in their legibility, it is necessary to actually connect those two facts together: an inherently structural process. But to understand the structures that exist between sentences, we need to go up another level.

Paragraph

One major obstacle to learning was that the equations in the student’s lecture notes were difficult to understand. There was no apparent relationship between individual formulas and the shapes they were supposed to define. The student’s notes were easier to read after they were reorganized.

In composing my example of a paragraph, I chose to adhere to what I was taught as an elementary student: a paragraph consists of at least three sentences. Actually, I was only taught this so that I would feel compelled to write more than one or two sentences; a paragraph does not legally have any minimum length. It can be only one sentence, even a simple one, if you want it to be.

The rules are artificial.

Nevertheless, the paragraph as a structural unit exists to organize and coordinate the meanings of sentences, so I thought it would be appropriate to craft my example in a way that would make my teachers proud and earn me a check-mark in their grade books. It is just too difficult to show how multiple sentences can work together if there is only one sentence to examine.

As I have written before, a well-crafted sentence can grow to remarkable lengths with all of the depth and complexity that is possible to achieve in a paragraph. Such sentences, however, are the product of deliberate cultivation, because people don’t really talk like that. Spoken sentences are often constrained by the number of words it is possible to pronounce in a single breath, and when a sentence contains multiple independent clauses it is common to pause for a small breath at the boundary between them. Read that last sentence out loud, and you will see what I mean. That one too.

Because of this, the rationale for writing a paragraph of four or five sentences made up of one or two clauses each, as opposed to writing a single sentence containing about twelve independent clauses, is at least partly grounded in wanting to give readers an opportunity to breathe more deeply and often. But it is also about lessening the cognitive load as the reader processes the meaning of a sentence and incorporates that meaning into their understanding of the piece as a whole. Those last two sentences could have easily been one; all I had to do was remove the period. I just wanted to lighten your load, is all.

When a writer assembles a paragraph out of a handful of sentences, they are signalling to the reader that these sentences have something to say together, or that the meaning of one sentence within the paragraph may not be fully apparent unless it is considered within the paragraph as a whole. This structural act of communication becomes a part of the meaning as well.

Consider the example paragraph: in the first sentence it introduces and names a problem; in the second sentence it elaborates on the nature of the problem; in the third sentence it concludes by explaining how the problem was addressed. Individually, each sentence is little more than a statement of fact. Together, they form a narrative. Sentence three (the example sentence of the last section) contains a fragment of narrative already with its description of cause and effect, but without the other two we lack the context to understand how pressing the need for reorganization was.

To provide additional context within a single sentence generally requires adding additional clauses, increasing its complexity at the risk of diminishing its clarity. The paragraph structure allows the writer to manage complexity while preserving meaning, allowing the text to achieve a desired rhythm. The rhythm of sentences within a paragraph is one of the most important factors in creating voice, that elusive concept that ultimately boils down to the feeling that the text was composed by a human personality.

Paragraphs are microcosms of writing. They have beginnings, middles, and endings, they have topics and themes, and they have individual identities. At the level of the paragraph, the craft of expressing meaning through writing becomes less about negotiating the mechanics of verbal morphology or grammar and syntax, and more about the intangible circumstances that allow ideas to develop into fullness. It is in the coordination of paragraphs that we approach the next level of structure.

The Whole

It should not be surprising to say…

There are any number of possible organizational tiers above the paragraph. It may be part of a section that forms a fourth of a chapter, which in turn forms a twentieth of a volume, constituting half of a novel, being the first part of an epic trilogy. It may also be only one fifth of a five-paragraph essay. There aren’t very many unique considerations to account for in crafting these things; broadly speaking, each tier below the top is an opportunity to adjust the meaning of the piece as a whole.

The aim of any person who writes at length is to communicate ideas that are more than the sum of their parts. In this essay, written for the dual purpose of clarifying my own thoughts and feelings about structure, and offering insight to any confused youth who might have wandered onto my blog, I have mostly listed and explained some of the things that I know about how words go together. What has hopefully emerged from all that is an expression of what writing means to me, and what I hope that the young people now attempting to learn to write will come to understand about the process.

This essay began with an introductory section, explaining the purpose I held in occupying so much of your valuable time. What followed were a series of separate sections wherein I described the limitations and possibilities of expressing meaning, and the way that meaning is created through structure, via the morphology of words, the grammar of sentences, and the organizing narrative principle of the paragraph. Now we are in the last section, where I will attempt to create a satisfying conclusion that won’t leave you feeling like I stopped writing just because I got bored and ran out of things to say.

When I was in grad school, discussing the merits of different approaches to education, I participated in a discussion around the merits of structure. Some of my classmates of a more starry-eyed persuasion rejected “structure,” associating it with rigidity, conformity, joylessness, and other such hateful things. I hate those things too, but I pushed back against this framing. I believed then, as I do now, that structure emerges naturally through language and other forms of self-expression, and that structures are as often flexible, asymmetric, and organic as they are artificial or authoritarian. Whatever structure you adopt, mastery lies in understanding it.

Most of what I have written here concerns the use of structure to achieve clarity, making intended meanings more apparent for the reader. Sometimes we don’t necessarily want clarity, and to suit our self-expression we write to be murky, obscure, ambiguous, impressionistic, or cryptic. But what I hope I have made clear is that structure is inseparable from language, and that these qualities, whether they are intended or desirable or neither of these things, are also consequences of structure.

Ultimately, my conviction is that it benefits anybody who makes anything, for whatever reason they have made it, to understand what they have done. Understanding leads to better work, and in the case of writing, better self-expression contributes to the wisdom and welfare of the world. I haven’t got the wherewithal to prove all that just yet, but as I work on becoming a better writer, I’m confident that I’ll get there.