Words to Edit By
Make sure you communicate your complete thoughts to the reader. Complete thoughts need an actual subject and an actual verb, not decoys lurking in prepositional phrases. Sentence fragments aren’t out of the question, but use them sparingly to avoid choppiness.
A Realist Take
The highfalutin name for a complete thought is an independent clause. It may be a complete sentence, or it may be attached to another clause. A clause is a group of words with a subject (which may have others words hanging off of it, like little grammatical gargoyles) and a predicate (which is a fancy name for a verb and any words hanging off of the verb).
But don’t be too hasty, Master Took: some clauses—dependent (subordinate) clauses—still aren’t complete thoughts.
Then come phrases. A phrase is a group of related words that’s not a clause. Maybe it has a subject without a verb, or a verb without a subject. A prepositional phrase is a common kind of phrase that begins with a word called a preposition. You’d be doing yourself a favor to learn the laundry list of prepositions so you can tell them apart from conjunctions, which connect clauses. (See this Webster entry for help with prepositions—though as an Anglophile, I’ve got mixed feelings about Webster. Don’t get me started about online dictionaries.)
Recall that sometimes a noun isn’t a subject of a clause. Decoy subjects abound! A decoy subject is often:
a direct object—a noun that’s the focus or “recipient” of a verb’s action or state of being
The warrior’s comrade handed him his shield.
an indirect object—a noun that’s the focus or recipient of a direct object
The warrior’s comrade handed him his shield.
an object of the preposition—a noun that’s the focus of a preposition
The warrior’s comrade returned his shield to him.
an appositive—a word (or phrase) that puts the actual subject in different words (so at least you’re getting warmer)
The warrior’s comrade, a stout fellow, returned his shield to him.
There’s no shame in finding it tough to spot decoys. These matters require a certain degree of grammatical understanding. A knowledgeable copyeditor or proofreader is like a blacksmith examining a sword, or an engineer or architect looking at a building, and perceiving how it was constructed—how it works under the surface.
With pointers, practice, and perseverance, you can get the hang of grammatical analysis, but some sentences are tricksy. That’s why each editorial pass, and each pair of eyes, helps.
Fragments, by the way, are just incomplete sentences. A phrase made into its own sentence is a fragment.
There are folks who will tell you sentence fragments are a cardinal sin. But it depends—on who the intended reader is, what expectations of formality are attached to the genre, and the tone and overall style of the writing.
For Instance
*Is it a clause? What kind of clause? A phrase? A fragment? (*Here’s a hint: *the last three were fragments.) To figure out if there’s an actual subject and/or an actual verb in a group of related words, *try crossing out all of the phrases and seeing what’s left to analyze.
In the example paragraph above, the independent clauses have an asterisk in front. They’d make sense standing on their own.
“Is it a clause?” It is the subject, while is is the verb.
“Here’s a hint.” Hint is the subject, while is is (again) the verb.
“The last three were fragments.” Three is the subject, while were is the verb.
“Try crossing out all of the phrases and seeing [what is left to analyze].” The subject in an imperative sentence (an instruction or command) like this is a phantom you (formally, an understood you) because it’s implied that “you” (the hearer) will be doing the verb(s)—in this case, crossing out and seeing.
Dependent clauses are italicized in the example paragraph:
“If there’s an actual subject and/or an actual verb” includes the compound subject subject and verb and also the verb is (hidden in there’s). But the clause begins with a connecting word called a conjunction, If, that keeps the clause from being able to stand on its own. It leans on the independent clause that follows.
“What’s left” is called a relative clause, and this one is a weird little situation. It’s got a relative pronoun (a substitute noun) what as the subject, and the verb is, but the whole clause is also pinch-hitting as the object of seeing in the previous clause. Don’t fret too much about this tangled web. Life is fleeting.
As the example paragraph suggests, I’ve crossed out the phrases. The paragraph includes prepositional phrases beginning with in and of. There are also a couple of verb infinitive phrases. (Alas, to is part of a verb construction sometimes, not a preposition.) “To figure out” introduces a dependent clause while “to analyze” tells you more about what.
Sentence fragments are bolded in the example. Fragments seem a good editorial choice here because it would be tedious of me, and throw off the pacing, to write out the series of questions with all of the parallel bits repeated: Is it a clause? What kind of clause is it? Is it a phrase? Is it a fragment? You see what I mean. You also saw what I meant without me spelling out all the words.
It’s okay if all this seems complicated. It often is. If you don’t get this stuff yet, you probably hate it. If you do get it, you may still hate it. That’s also okay. You can write well, and even edit well most of the time, with an intuitive (not explicit) understanding of these things. However, when it comes to giving a tricky sentence a tune-up, depth of mechanical understanding helps. It also helps you ‘splain yourself—justify your recommendations—to another writer or editor.
Related Editing Guidelines & Tips
[Specific guideline and tip articles will be listed here as they’re published.]
Godspeed and happy rewriting!