The Sentence as an Instrument

A sentence is not a container for a thought. It is the shape the thought takes, and changing the shape changes what has been thought.

This sounds like a literary conceit and is in fact a practical claim, testable on any paragraph you have written. Take a sentence in which the agent has disappeared — mistakes were made, the decision was taken, concerns have been raised — and restore the agent. Something happens that is not stylistic. A question that the original sentence made unaskable becomes askable, and frequently the answer to it is the entire matter under discussion.

The passive is only the most familiar case. Nominalisation does the same work more quietly: the moment an action becomes a noun, it loses its tense, its agent and its object in a single move, and can then be arranged on the page like furniture. "We failed to check" becomes "a failure of verification", which has no one in it, happened at no particular time, and can be placed at the end of a sentence where nobody has to look at it.

Subordination distributes emphasis, and it does so whether or not the writer intended anything. What sits in the main clause is what the sentence is about; what sits in a subordinate clause has been marked as background, and the reader accepts that marking almost without noticing. Two sentences containing identical facts, differing only in which clause is subordinate, will leave a reader with two different impressions of what happened — and neither sentence has said anything untrue.

The reason to know this is not to write more beautifully. It is that the same instruments work on you when you are reading, and they work best when you are not attending to them. A prose style is a set of decisions about what the reader will be able to ask, and those decisions are made in the grammar, before any question of honesty arises at the level of fact.

Reading aloud is where this becomes obvious, which is why it is worth doing deliberately. The voice will not let you skim. A clause that seemed clear on the page turns out to have nowhere to breathe; an emphasis you did not intend arrives because the syntax put it there; a sentence you were pleased with reveals that its main claim is buried in its third clause, where you had quietly put it in order not to have to defend it.

You cannot hear any of that silently. You can hear all of it in one reading out loud, and that is the whole argument for doing it.