Quinn Cook

the queen, my lord, is dead.

an unmistakable sentence. not because it’s a famous line from Shakespeare (when Lady Macbeth finally gets out that damn spot), but because no matter where you stop in the sentence, you cannot mistake its message.

this may not sound very interesting, but it’s a fun exercise: when thinking to yourself, or writing a paper, or reading a book, stop and read the sentence word by word. at any point in the sentence (before the period), can you stop reading and still have received a grammatically complete sentence, without having understood what it was actually saying? has the meaning totally flipped?

the easy example is a sentence ending in a negation:

i have not

becomes, stopping after the second word,

i have

it’s simple, but it gets the message across. if you muse over whatever sentences you have at hand, you’ll find there are many such situations; from just the preceding full paragraph, you can truncate

at any point in the sentence (before the period), can you stop reading and still have received a grammatically complete sentence, without having understood what it was actually saying?

to become

at any point in the sentence (before the period), can you stop reading and still have received a grammatically complete sentence

or even

at any point in the sentence (before the period), can you stop reading

even here i managed to save some of the extraneous information by putting a dependent clause up front, rather than later on.

now take a few sentences and play around with them. it’s not hard to find a sentence that is mistakable (that is, not unmistakable, i.e., it violates my little test), but it’s also not hard to fix. to write a first draft at speed, or to speak naturally in such a manner would be fairly difficult to maintain constantly, but in editing and with thought there is no challenge.

the next step, then, is to stop yourself from sticking stuff right up front in a mishmash of dependent clauses. unmistakable prose is suspenseful, waiting to release its audience until the very end; to make us wait by droning on with dependent clauses is not to build anticipation—all it does is annoy.

in a well-written unmistakable sentence, neither will there be extraneous words hanging on at the end, after the release; if they don’t change the meaning of the sentence, and are not core to the sentiment expresed, why should we listen after we’ve already exhaled our bated breath at the climax of the sentence?

the task is not only to write an unmistakable sentence, but to write a beautifully unmistakable sentence. it is, of course, a pointless task: unmistakability is neither a sufficient nor necessary condition of good writing. in fact, if one wrote only unmistakable sentences, one after another, i think their reader would have a stroke consuming such artifice for an extended period of time.

but, if you have a few spare moments to bat a sentence around your head, you oughtta give it a try.