Chapter 2 -- Conjunctions that Kill: Subordination

Say, here's a god-awful sentence:

After walking into the office, retrieving the gun from his desk drawer, shooting his business partner in the face, and quickly beginning to understand that he needed to escape immedi­ately, John realized he was very tired.

If you don't see right away what's so terrible about that sentence, read it again, but don't focus on the grammar or the adverbs or even the length. Focus on the meaning. What's the main point? A number of things are happening in this sentence: a man walks into an office, he gets a gun, he shoots his business partner in the face, and he gets that panicky get-me-out-of-here impulse. All great information. But what is the central point of the sentence? What is its main clause, the bit of information presumably so exciting, so pivotal that every other action in this sentence is mere accessory to it? It's John realized he was tired.

We'll talk about clauses in chapter 3. Subsequent chapters will look at some of the other structural issues in this passage. But I wrote this deliberately bad sentence to illustrate an issue we should cover right away-one of the least-known but perhaps most helpful con­cepts for writing good sentences: subordinating conjunctions.

The job of a subordinating conjunction is (drum roll, please) to subordinate. It relegates a clause to a lower grammatical status in the sentence. Subordination is not a bad thing. On the contrary, subordination through the use of conjunctions like after is a crucial and interesting dynamic of the language. But when you don't fully understand the power of subordinating conjunctions, they can suck the life out of your writing faster than you can say "rejection letter." The problem they can create is sometimes called upside-down subor­dination. It's a simple concept. It means that a sentence inadvertently takes some less-interesting piece of information like "John was tired" and treats it as though it were more notable than "John shot his busi­ness partner in the face." Occasionally, that might be exactly what the writer intended. But often it's accidental and undermines the sentence.

I first noticed this subordination problem when I started hang­ing out at writers' Internet message boards. On these sites, aspiring authors often post their query letters-the pitches that authors write to literary agents to try to persuade them to read their manuscripts. The query writers ask others to critique the letters. Many of the let­ters contain rambling sentences, incoherent sentences, sentences that don't jibe with previous sentences, danglers, comma splices-you name it. But the most troubling mistake occurs when a writer subor­dinates the interesting action. That is, he relegates the exciting stuff to a lower grammatical status.

Query letters are prone to subordination problems. In a query, an author must synopsize and sell her own book. It is a task that can trip up even the most skilled writer. After all, if an author has just spent a year or two steeped in every minuscule detail of the characters she made up from scratch, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. She's spent countless hours laboring over the minutiae of her own story, so she can't bring herself to omit the details that just aren't important enough to go in a query. Instead, the writer's solution is to cram in as many exciting details as possible. All too often, the result is a sentence like the one at the beginning of this chapter.

To understand what's wrong with such sentences and to learn to write better ones, you need to take a moment to learn about conjunctions.

Conjunctions, as those of you of a certain age will remember from Schoolhouse Rock, are for "hooking up words and phrases and clauses." They're little words like and, if, but, so, and because. We use them every day with no problem. We seldom stop to think about them.

Conjunctions come in different varieties. The best-known ones-the conjunctions highlighted by Schoolhouse Rock-are the coordina­tors, which are distinct from the subordinators. Coordinators are a small group that includes and, or, and but. Their job is to link units of equal grammatical status.

I eat oranges and I eat apples.

Here, the coordinator and is linking clauses that could stand on their own as sentences. I eat oranges. I eat apples. These units are equals. Neither is dependent on the other. They both have something  ...