How to not write bad - Ben Yagoda 2013
End strong
How to not write bad
[Having a strong ending is as important as having a strong beginning for a sentence.]
I hope you see how the sentence above—while being grammatically correct, precise, and relatively concise—violates the very maxim it offers, and as a result ends up as weak as the beer at a college mixer.
Unfortunately, a great many of our first-draft sentences seem to want to end with a whimpering trail of prepositional phrases, nonessential details, and other extraneous material. One word for this is anticlimax. Once you’ve recognized the problem—a key step, as always—the first thing to do is figure out which word represents the most important idea, then see if you can make this the last word. In the example, it was pretty easy to figure out that this magic word was ending and to shove it to the end:
Possibly the most important principle in constructing sentences is having a strong ending.
You usually won’t go wrong if you end with a direct object. Concluding prepositional phrases are unavoidable, to a certain extent, but never double or triple them. Thus The priest went back to his homeland is fine, but not The priest went back to his homeland after his vacation. To fix that one, how about:
After his vacation, the priest went back to his homeland.
It’s not always that simple. Consider:
1. [He’s going to attack a lot of these problems about global warming in the future.]
2. [The winner of the lottery was an employee of the firm named Henry Galston.]
3. [In a flurry we grabbed some plastic containers filled with sprouts and kimchi, spending about $12.75 on these ingredients for dinner.]
One helpful strategy for the first two is, rather than look for the most important concept, to take almost the opposite tack: gather together the trailing-off stuff and front-load it, either at the beginning of the sentence or before key nouns and verbs. By the way, both 1 and 2 are not only weak but have ambiguity problems. In 1, are we talking about future problems or a future attack?; and in 2, a reader briefly wonders if this firm might conceivably be called Henry Galston.
After front-loading, number 1 becomes:
In the future, he’s going to attack a lot of these global-warming problems.
Number 2 is better served by flipping the whole thing around:
An employee named Henry Galston won the lottery.
The third sentence, meanwhile, is better served by being cut in two:
In a flurry we grabbed some plastic containers filled with sprouts and kimchi. The damages were $12.75.
Much more often than not, you will want your last word to be a noun. I just took a look at a “Talk of the Town” piece by a good New Yorker writer named Nick Paumgarten (“Big Picture,” July 11 and 18, 2011) and calculated that (not counting quotations), thirty-nine of the forty-five sentences in it end with nouns, pronouns, or proper names. All of these are either direct objects (as in the second sentence in the following passage) or the object of prepositional phrases (as in the first). The article is about a newfangled Polaroid camera, which is operated by a woman named Jennifer Trausch:
The strobe flash made a loud pop, and Trausch began slowly pulling the paper through the machine. She laid the print on the table and after ninety seconds peeled back the protective layer to reveal a stately black-and-white image edged in a chemical sludge they call “goop.”
Of the six non-noun-ending sentences in the article—all of which are good sentences, by the way—four end with verbs and two with adjectives. An example of the first category is a long sentence that discusses Polaroid enthusiasts’ efforts “…to try to make new film, using different chemicals and processes, since the old ones were environmentally hazardous or difficult to duplicate.”
An example of the second (referring to the director Oliver Stone, three photos of whom were taken with the camera) is: “Stone and the camera crew stood over them, trying to choose which was best.”
Going through the other parts of speech, you will never (except for stunts) end a sentence with an article or conjunction. Adverbs can work when it’s the adverb you’re stressing:
He played relentlessly and well.
That leaves prepositions. In the last chapter, I said it’s not in fact true that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition. However, you normally shouldn’t, because prepositions are so often weak that you could make the case they are inherently so. Consider:
[Abernathy lives in the neighborhood the cougar was found in.]
Yuck—and note the repetition of in. The fix that will usually first come to mind involves the word which, which leads in this case to:
[Abernathy lives in the neighborhood in which the cougar was found.]
That’s not so good, either. It’s wordy, and pretty obvious you’re trying to avoid a preposition at the end. The way to go here is to flip things around:
The cougar was found in Abernathy’s neighborhood.
To be sure, prepositions can work as endings. You just have to take each sentence on its merits.
What in God’s name are you talking about?
I wish those cougars would go back where they came from.
Don’t come in.