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Chapter 15: PEACOCK
SENTENCES
How can you make easily readable sentences? ---
Introduction: Grammar the Deadly
Killer?
English Sentence: Two Simple Parts
Land of
Peacock Sentences
Nose Feathers
Baby Peacocks
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Writing clear sentences is a craft that requires you
know the basic three parts of a sentence. This chapter uses the symbol of
an animal to represent the three parts of a typical sentence. Then the
chapter shows you how to use these three parts to make sentences much clearer to
readers.
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Introduction: Grammar the Deadly Killer?
The grammatical sentence always has been—in too many English classes—a
traditional, formal, even pompous affair that many students have learned to hate
or, at least, to avoid.
If you were one of these students, you probably were among the majority
of your classmates in elementary and high school—if indeed you even had any
formal instruction in how to write a sentence.
Either way, once you have tried to use or even have just looked at a
formal grammar handbook, you may feel that the formal rules of making sentences,
sentence parts, and punctuation for them are a highly specialized method of
torture invented just to cause you exquisite suffering.
You may have found yourself sweating over papers and growing red in the
face when speaking in public as you try to figure out where to put the pauses of
commas and colons, where to begin and end sentences, and how to use them to
start, continue, and end paragraphs. A
popular fantasy in the backs of the minds of many people, in fact, is that the
whole grammar thing was invented by evil grammar villains: little, ancient
gnomes with umpteen college degrees working in small rooms in high towers of
dark university castles in rooms never lit by the sun, who gather secretly just
to make the rules torturous so that no one will ever, ever—no matter how hard
he or she tries—get the grammar thing right.
This reminds me of my hardest teacher ever, Mrs. Seward, and her best
student, Alice Robinson. I took Mrs.
Seward’s English courses twice, in my first and third years of high school,
and I dreaded each one. She was
everything traditional and formal that Mr. Golding from the
"How I Learned"
chapter
was, but with none of Mr. Golding's fun
and fire. Mrs. Seward was nearly the
smallest person in the whole school, teachers and students included, and yet
possibly the scariest. Even other
teachers feared her knife-quick ear for grammar mistakes as they stumbled over
their speech when she was nearby.
I
was a very good student, but I couldn’t quite get past Mrs. Seward.
When I was her student, she never gave out more than one “A” per
course, and sometimes not any. And
my main competitor in high school, Alice Robinson, knew her grammar a little better than
I. In addition, Alice was willing to slave away over learning the rules of
grammar more than I was.
Mrs. Seward made the sentence, and indeed all grammar, as torturous as my
worst dreams. We memorized
rules and recited them. We had
objective tests that required definition and example, and multiple-choice tests
on good and bad usage of grammar. We
diagrammed the parts of sentences endlessly.
I learned a lot from Mrs. Seward, and I owe her a debt of thanks,
especially since I became an English teacher myself.
I also owe an even greater debt of thanks to my mother, an elementary and
later a Carl Sandberg Community College teacher, who spent much of my early years correcting my
grammar. She and Mrs. Seward
together did quite a job both for me and on me.
However,
in all honesty, I think my mother’s grammar lessons were better because they
were in situ, which means they occurred right in each situation. I was
talking, and she corrected me--gently but firmly--as I actually practiced communicating.
I’m not sure that Mrs. Seward’s drill-and-kill methods were the best
way for many, maybe even most, people in my classes.
I suspect that we should have done more writing practice, perhaps some
grammar games, and maybe some visualizations--some imaginations--of what the
English sentence is and does. In any case, to continue the story about
Alice Robinson and me, Alice kept beating me for that one “A” per semester,
and I had to settle every semester for a "B+." Even so, Alice and I were
among only a handful of people who were able to memorize most of the rules and
then apply them to our writing. If Mrs. Seward's lessons were hard for me,
they must have been a nightmare for half the class. Mrs. Seward represented the traditional, more rule-bound, and difficult-to-learn
aspect of the English sentence. Indeed, when I was in high school, I would not
have been surprised to discover that she, herself, had been elected to serve as
one of the mysterious, ancient gnomes in their ivory towers who seem to create
grammar rules to bring humankind misery.
When I started teaching, I came
across a number of students who said, typically, “I have never understood
grammar and probably never will.” I
decided that part of the problem was not in these students or in grammar itself,
but rather in the way that grammar is taught.
Lessons in grammar primarily use what is sometimes called the left side
or the “verbal-logical” part of the brain—the same part that tends to help
people learn foreign languages, abstract mathematics, and literary texts well.
However, a significant number of undergraduate college students learn
better using another part of the brain, one sometimes called the right side or
“visual-sensory” part. And some
students are more comfortable using both parts.
Grammar instruction really is not well developed in most textbooks to
help students who prefer a partly or wholly visual-sensory orientation.
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English Sentence: Two Simple Parts
So, in my early years of teaching,
I began to look for a more visual symbol of the sentence as a starting point for
explaining grammar. I thought of
everything—planes, trains, and automobiles; bacteria, animals, birds, and
people; machines; weather patterns; etc. One
of my early ideas came from my first-grade teacher, who used the symbol of a
train. “Imagine,” she used to
say, in words like this but aimed at first graders, “that a sentence is like a
train. The subject of the car is the
engine. It pulls the train.
The verb of the sentence is the coal car.
It gives the sentence energy. And
all the other cars coming after it are the rest of the words in a sentence that
make it more interesting.”
The engine and coal car symbol are
not bad, but I decided right away not to use it.
This was because my first-grade teacher, years earlier, had been as
ancient as the hills even then. By
the time I started teaching, coal cars were a thing of the past.
Second, the idea of a sentence being like a train seemed to me a bit too
mechanical. I wanted something
conveying the idea of the sentence being a living, breathing organism, one with
a life of its own.
That is when I decided to compare
the sentence to an animal. The
animal’s head would represent the subject of a sentence; its body would
represent the verb of a sentence. Here’s
why. All sentences in the English
language have a subject and a verb: all of them.
In some languages, they don’t, but in English they do.
In Latin, for example, you could say, “I love” in one word and thus have
a one-word sentence:
Amo.
In other words, some other languages show a direct
correspondence between an act and a single word to represent it.
However, we speakers of the English language (and those who
speak many other languages as well) divide all acts into two parts: the doer of
the act and the physical act itself. This
means that if I want to translate the Latin “Amo,” above, into English, I
must
divide it into (a) who is doing it and (b) what is being done:
I
love.
There are many two-word sentences
in English,
each with a “head” (the subject) and a “body” (the verb):
Subject (who
does it)
Verb (what is being done)
We
talked.
I
relaxed.
You
ran.
One of the most famous two-word sentences
in English can be found in
the Christian New Testament:
“Jesus
wept.”
Even the sentences that are called “command sentences,” such as
Go.
Come here.
Know thyself.
All command sentences like these have what are called "understood" subjects:
(You) go.
(You) come here.
(You) know thyself.
Thus every
complete sentence in formal English--even a command sentence--has at least two
parts: the subject (or head) and the verb (or body). But what, I asked
myself, about the rest of most sentences. Most sentences contain a lot more
words and phrases than just the simple subject and simple verb. In fact,
some writers--and literary works--are famous for their long sentences.
Here is an example of just two sentences from one of the United States' most
famous and most awarded writers ever, William Faulkner
(with beginning subjects and verbs
underlined):
[The bear] loomed and towered in [the boy’s]
dreams before he even saw the...woods [where no ax had ever been
used] where it left its crooked print, shaggy, tremendous, red-eyed, not
malevolent but just bit, too big for the dogs which tried to [howl at]
it, for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and the
bullets they fired into it; too big for the very country which was its
constricting scope. It
was as
if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not
encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly
and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it
was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land
where the old bear had earned a name, and through [the bear] ran not even
a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable ad invincible out of an old
dead tie, a phantom, [symbol] and [high point] of the old wild life which
the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and
fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant…. (1532. William Faulkner. “The Bear.”
American Poetry
and Prose, 4th Ed., Part II. Ed. Norman Foerster.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.)
Again, this long passage has but two
extra-long sentences in it, no more. They prove that the English sentence, though built on a simple, two-part,
subject-verb pairing, can expand to a very wonderful and rich development with so many colorful
additions.
So, to get back to my story about
choosing an animal to represent the sentence, what kind of animal can represent
both the simplicity of a basic sentence and the richness and color of longer
sentences in English? I thought about a number of animals with obvious
tails, and almost chose the fox because of its bushy tail. But finally, I
decided that the peacock--with its long, very colorful tail feathers and its
additional little feather on top of its head--would be best:
Ash
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Land of Peacock Sentences
I have been teaching "peacock sentence making" to
college students since about 1988. But only recently did I find a great
free image of the peacock, in all its glory, to use on the web to explain what I
have been teaching in class:
Martin
I tell my classes that a peacock must have a head
and a body to survive. A sentence in English also must have a head and a body to
survive. The subject--the person, place, or thing the sentence is about--is the
head of the peacock. In addition, the verb--the active part--is the body of the
peacock.
(Subject and verb are underlined.)
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The peacock
(head
à)
is walking.
(body
à)
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Peacocks also have feathers--some very beautiful ones, sometimes. The
feathers curve out from the rear in an array of rainbow designs, catching
light, floating, waving, sometimes even dragging on the ground, so long are
they. These feathers on the tail are all the different words and phrases a
person can add to to the end of a sentence to make it more colorful and
descriptive:
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The peacock
(head
à)
is walking
(body
à)
around the yard,
trailing its feathers
(tail
à
and calling to us.
feathers)
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 |
Also, look at the peacock's head--did you ever notice that a peacock has a
comb of beautiful feathers sticking up and back from its head? There are
several of these head feathers, perhaps so they do not get in the way of the body:
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Proud and strong,
(head feathers
à)
the peacock
(head
à)
is walking
(body
à)
around the yard,
trailing its feathers
(tail
à
and calling to us.
feathers)
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|
We also can label the peacock's parts as follows:
S - V - m
These three letters stand for Subject-Verb-modifiers. We have discussed subjects and verbs.
Modifiers simply are added words that modify or describe something. They are all
the words and phrases that are not part of the main subject or main verb. Here is how
our peacock looks with the S-V-M label:
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(m)
Proud and strong,
(head feathers
à)
(S)
the peacock
(head
à)
(V)
is walking
(body
à)
(m)
around the yard,
trailing its feathers
(tail
à
and calling to us.
feathers)
|
|
The head feathers also can go right after the
peacock's head, like this:
|
(S)
The peacock,
(head
à)
(m)
proud and strong,
(head feathers
à)
(V)
is walking
(body
à)
(m)
around the yard,
trailing its feathers
(tail
à
and calling to us.
feathers)
|
|
So, we are left with four types of peacock sentence constructions:
S-V
S-V-m
m-S-V-m
S-m-V-m
All four are very much the same--what we can now
call the "SVm" peacock model of the sentence. We
will use this label--"SVm"--to refer to all four of the above sentence models
as we discuss sentence construction below.
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Nose Feathers
In the world of SVm peacock sentences, one very important principle principle about
S-V-m peacock sentence making is this: never stick a bunch of tail feathers on a
peacock's nose. When a peacock has a bunch of tail feathers on its nose,
it cannot see where it is going. It is likely to fall down or
wander off, blind. Similarly, if you place a large number of words--long,
introductory phrases--at the beginnings of your sentences, or right after the
subject, you are more likely to lose control of your sentence. People who
place lots of modifiers--long phrases right before or after their subjects, are
more likely to lose track of exactly where and how the subject or the verb goes.
They also are more likely to lose track of where commas and other punctuation
should go.
For example, here is a "nose feathers" sentence.
It has lots of long, introductory words and phrases before the subject:
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In the morning, before dawn
but after the dew, calling and walking in circles but never feeling happy, never
knowing love or affection, never feeling fed or watered, restless, tired,
drooping, and wondering whether the day would ever be over before it even
started,
the peacock
(head
à)
waited.
(body
à)
|
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 |
 |
"Nose feathers" on sentences also present a big
problem for readers. The problem is that readers must wait a long time to
find out the main part of what is happening--which is the subject and verb. You
have to wait too long before you get to the subject and the verb. Imagine a long
scholarly essay or professional article with lots of sentences like this. You
would find it harder to read quickly and easily. A sentence like this
often can just as easily be written with the nose feathers coming later in the
sentence, preferably at the end: not only can you as a writer keep better
control of the sentence, but your readers also will be able to read it much more
easily. Look, for example, at the sentence below. It is the same as
the one above except that all the "m's"--the modifier peacock feathers--are back
on the end of the peacock instead of on its nose:
|
The
peacock
(head
à)
waited
(body
à)
in the morning, before dawn but after the dew, calling and walking in circles
but never feeling happy, never knowing love or affection, never feeling fed or
watered, restless, tired, drooping, and wondering whether the day would ever be
over before it even started.
(tail
feathers
à)
|
|
This latter version of the sentence, immediately
above, is so much easier to read because the subject and verb come right away.
In fact, some of our greatest literary authors write using very long sentences
but, as in the example quoted above from
William Faulkner, the subject and verb of each sentence
come very early in the sentence, thus making all the additional phrases after
them much easier to understand.
Remember, too, the peacock's head feathers.
They symbolize the fact that it is okay, in making clear sentences, to add a few
introductory words--a short introductory phrase--at the beginning of a sentence
or just after the subject. A few words will not get in the way of easy
reading. Here are some examples:
In the morning, we went to town to
buy some flash drives on sale.
John and Megan, walking fast, hurried
into the store before us.
As a result, the two of them, lucky
people, won door prizes for being first.
These sentences are not difficult to read even with
some head feathers attached. That is because the subject and the verb of
each sentence come relatively quickly, making the sentences easy to read--and
more easily controllable for the writer. Just make sure your head feathers
don't become a big bunch of nose feathers. The best kind of writing for
the sake of clarity for readers, and ease of writing well for yourself, is the
SVm model: write your sentences subject-verb-modifiers, subject-verb-modifiers,
subject-verb-modifiers, each one, time after time.
You don't need to do this in a first draft. In
fact, it might be bad for you in a first draft! Just write your first
drafts freely, getting your content out onto the paper. However, try
revising a paper of yours--or even one page of it--in this way. Then put
it down for a day. Then, when you're alert, reread the new version.
How does it now flow? Is it easier to read? The secret is
subject-verb-modifiers.
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Baby Peacocks
However, there is one exception to the guideline
about avoiding nose feathers. Many writers famous, scholarly, and
professional take good advantage of this exception. The exception is that
if the introductory or interrupting words are actually a "dependent clause,"
then they are allowable. In peacock language, this means that if the nose
feathers are, instead, a "baby peacock," they can be easily understood.
What is a baby peacock? It is a little peacock--a little sentence with its
own head and body (subject and verb) that is still dependent on its parent.
It is not a sentence--a peacock--that can stand alone because of the way it is
constructed. But it does have its own little head (subject) and body
(verb). For example,
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If
someone
agrees,
(baby peacock
à)
then Marty and Suzi
(head
à)
can complete
(body
à)
their project
in the morning
(tail
feathers
à)
|
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 |
Here is an example of a baby peacock with its own
little tail feathers:
|
If
someone
agrees,
to the new plan,
(baby peacock
à)
then Marty and Suzi
(head
à)
can complete
(body
à)
their project
in the morning.
(tail
feathers
à)
|
|
|
|
And here is an example of a baby peacock that is
riding on its parent's neck or back:
|
Marty and Suzi,
(head
à)
if
someone
agrees,
to the new plan,
(baby peacock)
can complete
(body
à)
their project
in the morning.
(tail
feathers
à)
|
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Here are a few more examples of baby peacocks:
When they eat in the
morning, peacocks do not need to eat again until
evening.
Peacocks, if they
are fed a correct diet, can live for several years.
A healthy male peacock
may live much longer than most other birds are able
to survive.
Once again, because a baby peacock has its own
little subject and verb, it is more readable. As a result, you can use
baby peacocks at the beginnings of sentences or between the main subject and
verb, and readers can usually understand the complete sentence without too much
extra concentration. And as a result, you, the writer, usually can keep
control of your sentence, its subject and verb, and its punctuation marks
without too much additional confusion. You are still using a repeated SVm
pattern--subject-verb-modifiers, subject-verb-modifiers, etc.--but sometimes
with some additional baby peacocks--mini SVm clauses--thrown in.
Must you
write using baby peacocks? The answer is no--write how you like. The
only important guidelines in this regard are to be clear and to vary your
sentence lengths. You can be clear by using a consistent SVm pattern.
And you can vary the lengths of your sentences either by adding more tail
feathers, by occasionally throwing in some baby peacocks, or by doing both.
Peacock sentence writing can also help you
understand and cure the most common college-level grammar and punctuation
error--the dreaded comma splice. Peacocks also make understanding colons
(" : ") and semicolons (" ; ") easier. For more about these
problems, see the chapter on "Peacock Punctuation."
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