The Sentence that Kills Children

I do not consider myself to be a good writer. I do not even consider myself to be a decent writer. In fact, whenever I publish or hand in any written work I do so with an almost crippling sense of shame at how hopelessly inadequate my command of my native language remains despite eighteen years of total immersion in it. I do, however, have some grasp of what distinguishes utterly terrible writing from the inoffensively mediocre. Being that I can't write my way out of a subordinate clause without a nauseating degree of self-referential irony, I tend to hold back my nitpicks or outright condemnations of another's sub-substandard writing. Sometimes, though, there comes before my eyes such a travesty, such a shameful bastardization of all that marks English as a language worthy of human utterance, that I can not abide its existence. I'd compare it to being a bystander during the Holocaust, but that would be outrageous. I guess it's more like standing passive and inert while a child drowns in front of you. That's not so bad, right? I'm thinking the Jews wouldn't object to that level of insensitivity. Am I good? Judges? I'm getting the green light from Mordecai, my Hebrew-speaking roommate who is also the mounted head of a ram from Guatemala. Funny story about that, actually. Try getting that through customs. Ah, shit, this always happens. Where the hell was I? Jews? I need a drink.

Right. Ahem. Sorry about that. I was talking about writing.

So here is an excerpt from an article being used as an example of a good "conversational essay," in a freshman writing course at Columbia University. As you read this, try not to think of a child drowning. Try not to imagine her cherubic face sinking beneath the algae-encrusted surface of a stagnant pond as her arms slow their desperate thrashing and her bright blue eyes dilate in fear as she catches her last glimpse of this fleeting life, absolutely and permanently alone. Don't think about that at all.

"With its bright colors, rays of sun showering upon faces of influential leaders of different races, and inspiring slogans coined to stir the public to bridge the gap between races and socioeconomic divisions, a mural in the Soundview neighborhood of' the South Bronx on 174th St. entitled 'We Are Here to Awaken from the Illusions of Our Separateness" (Figs. 1-4) exemplifies a trend to create captivating and educational murals throughout New York City that deal with major socioeconomic and racial issues."

The horror. The...horror...

I'd like to point out up front that this is actually the first sentence of the essay. I'd also like to take a moment to ask the reader to consider whether or not he would ever willingly continue reading an essay that began like this, and if so, I'd like to humbly request that he shoot himself in the face.

I think I've thinned the herd enough. So let's begin.

First, take a moment to try to appreciate just how friggin' long this sentence is. Count the words. Go ahead. I dare you. No, but seriously, don't. It will hurt you. It's 80 words long.

Eighty words. Let's try to put that in perspective.

• The Lord's Prayer is 70 words long.
• Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") is 114 words.
• The Gettysburg Address is 271 words.
• The Declaration of Independence is 1322 words.

The following passage, the entirety of Chapter III from Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, is 75 words.

"We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell down into the garden. Then three more came over further down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that."

Before you object and say that using Hemingway as a comparison is unfair because the cornerstones of his style were short sentences and omission, among other things, take a minute to A.) suck my dick, and B.) kill yourself. Then read this following opening sentence from a little known work by Thomas "Two-Dolla-Billz" Jefferson:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

How long is this sentence, written in the 18th century era of diction so baroque it would have compelled Hemingway to punch a Spanish child in the face? Seventy-one words. Seventy-one words were all it took for Our Founding Fathers to state their thesis that America ought to be a country. But this other bitch can't even squirt out a point about some corny, inconsequential mural without weaving a 80-word brainfuck so serpentine it would make Milton ejaculate with envy. And yes, Milton could do that, because he was blind.

So allow me to break down this mammoth motherfucker into more manageable morsels. This sentence has:

• Two uses of the word "races," less than 15 words apart.
• Another use of the word "racial."
  
• Two uses of the word "socioeconomic."
• Two present active participles.
  
• Two perfect passive participles.
• Five uses of the word "of."
• Five uses of the word "the."
• One totally unnecessary and ill-placed address.
  
• One main singular subject, "a mural," 35 words deep in the sentence.
  
• One main verb, "exemplifies."
  
• No strong verbs.
  
• Nothing good at all.

A social studies teacher would call this sentence a "thesis," but only, I hope, through a clenched jaw and with tears of agony welling up in her eyes. An English teacher would call this sentence many things, most of them profane, but among them, "top-heavy."

What's a top-heavy sentence? It's a bland, fairly simple sentence that a lazy and/or foolish writer has decided to obscure by piling an unreasonable amount of adverbial phrases and other modifiers in front of it. Imagine a scrawny guy with knobby knees and a small penis who wears a mohawk to distract people from his shortcomings. Now turn him into a sentence. He's top-heavy, and he also, strangely enough, resembles a drowning child.

There are a few reasons someone might want to make a top-heavy sentence. None of them could possibly apply to thesis-writing. And besides, no amateur writer does this deliberately. They do it because they don't know shit.

Now let's really dig into these stupid literary mohawks.

"With its bright colors..."

So what the hell do bright colors have to do with anything? Let's put it somewhere else and see how it reads: "A mural with its bright colors exemplifies a trend to create captivating and educational murals..." Bright colors are arguably captivating, but is this person really using bright colors as evidence for a key point of her thesis? You know--since normally murals use dreary colors, so nobody will look at them. How astute of her to point out the bright colors. She's a sublime aesthete. A goddamn idiot-savant. Gag me.

"...rays of sun showering upon faces of influential leaders of different races..."

Isn't that pretty. I love rays of sun. I love them almost as much as rays of sunlight, which is a cliche which actually makes some sort of sense. And I love them almost as much as I love boring theses that try to wax poetic to cover up their complete irrelevance. I also love the use of "showering" to describe light, since we all know light falls just like rain and isn't a trite way to describe "rays of sun" at all. Though, the second half of the sentence is what really bothers me. Her use of influential is totally unnecessary. What leader isn't influential? She could have cut this sentence down to a trim 79 words, just like that. Worst of all, the ambiguity of "of" leaves the reader wondering if she means the leaders come from different racial backgrounds, or whether different races have their own leaders--like the King of the Blacks, or Emperor Whitey, or something. Nice attention to detail, Ms. Bright Colors.

"...and inspiring slogans coined to stir the public to bridge the gap between races and socioeconomic divisions..."

This one came as a relief. After slogging through those last two bewildering items on this list, I was appreciative that the writer thought to remind me that "inspiring" things are meant to "stir" people. I thought it had something to do with food or something, because I don't know much about them wordstuffs without her done telling me synonyms straightaway. It was also sweet of her to include that passive participle without any agent. Honestly, I don't really want to know who "coined" these slogans. I expect it's totally irrelevant. And I certainly know precisely what she means by the "gap between races." And the idea of "gaps between...divisions" just plain tickles me. I imagine it resembles the space between her ears.

I might be more willing to excuse this writer's offenses if I suspected she never read anything good. I mean, then, who could blame her for writing crap? If the extent of her literary experience was R.L. Stine and Barbara Kingsolver, then I'd understand and just shrug her off as a amiably goofy rookie. Unfortunately, I can't believe this. I can tell she's actually had some instruction in the art of essay writing, as well as at least an introduction to the quarks of rhetoric. How do I know this?

ASCENDING TRICOLON.

Ascending Tricolon is one of the most common rhetorical devices, and perhaps the easiest to use effectively. It really does the work for you. All you need to do is have a list of three things, hence the "tri-colon," and as you list them, make them either longer, more complicated, or more important in some way. Ascending tricolon mimics the structure of a good five-paragraph essay, in which the three-paragraph body begins with the weakest argument and builds to the strongest. Lots of people use this tool without even knowing what it's called, or maybe realizing they're doing it, in conversation as well as writing. It's a fairly commonsense way to phrase a list, and it generally works well in jokes. Paradoxically, the best way to tell that someone is conscious that they're doing it is if it's really, really poorly done. If it is clearly forced or just reeks of pretension. For instance, when someone really only has two things to list, but makes up a third to fill it out. This happens all the time in Time Magazine. It has also clearly happened in this train-wreck of a sentence we have in question. I mean, really: bright colors? Jesus H. Christ.

This girl has a level of education and rhetorical comprehension necessary to use ascending tricolon, but all the common sense of a squirrel trying to cross the street. She steps into this sentence, then freezes and thinks about the meaning of acorns or some shit, and apparently gets squished by a metaphorical bus, since it strikes her as a good idea to put in the address of the mural for no friggin' reason at all. I figure her brain was liquefied in the middle of writing this rubbish and all the information she actually had inside it just spilled out onto the page. Her ascending tricolon builds into a perfect anticlimax, almost twenty-five words of apposition, which is the syntactical equivalent of a sinkhole filled with the rotting corpses of unicorns.

Forget Hemingway punching this bitch in the face. We're talking a Cicero beatdown right here.

And then we finally get to the predicate, and she basically spits in our face. What she actually says, once you strip away all the fat, is "...a mural...exemplifies a trend to create...murals." You're kidding. That's what you're telling us? That's what took you EIGHTY WORDS? A mural is evidence of murals? I. HATE. YOU.


I can't go on any further. Eli, I'm tagging you in.

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Well Tim, you pretty much covered all bases there. But let me stress again the needless repetition in this catastrophe of a sentence. We are told early on that the mural has "inspiring slogans coined to stir the public to bridge the gap between races and socioeconomic divisions". Awesome, now we know what the mural is all about. Yet, apparently the horrendous phrasing is not enough for the statement to stick in our minds. The author must again tell us at the end of the sentence that the mural "exemplifies a trend to create captivating and educational murals throughout New York City that deal with major socioeconomic and racial issues."

You're kidding. You're kidding! We already know the fucking mural is in New York. You even told us the address. We already know the whole crap about racial and socioeconomic issues, you told us about 50 words earlier. We even already know the mural is educational. What the FUCK did you tell us in those last 21 words? That it's a trend? Well I've got news for you, bud: By this point in time, I could care less if these murals were a fucking revolution. If you can't express your thoughts any better, they're not worth hearing.

In closing, I'd like to touch back on something Tim mentioned earlier. The only way to learn to write well is to read. Now, whether or not most college students read is a topic for another debate. However, by this point in the semester every Columbia student has read Homer's Iliad, Homer's Odyssey The Homeric Hymns and Herodotus' Histories. These books are the foundation of all literature. They may not be the best examples of how to write for the modern author, but if you are unable to take any sense of written language from them then there is no hope for your academic career. Please, do us all a favor and never write again.