It was the best of sentences, it was the worst of sentences - June Casagrande 2010

The the: Not-so-definite definite articles

Look, there's a cat.

Look, there's the cat.

Ever Stop to think about the word the? It's a tiny word, yet it's huge. It carries so much responsibility. It leans so heavily on your Reader. It says, "You're expected to know what I'm talking about." I guess that's why it's so annoying when a writer hasn't done her due diligence before dumping this expectation on you.

Katie screamed and grabbed the diary.

This is rock-solid writing if and only if you've addressed the question what diary? If you've mentioned somewhere earlier in the story that there exists a diary—if you've introduced it—the diary is fine. But if this is the first mention of the diary, that little the sends a bad message to the Reader. It says, "You know. The diary. The one I told you about." Even though you've done no such thing.

It's rude.

We all understand the basic idea of the without having to think about it. We get it intuitively. Unfortunately, all too often novice writers become lost in the information they're trying to convey and forget themselves. This is understandable. If you've been concocting a story involving a diary, that diary is very familiar to you. You know it intimately in a way that only a creator can. You know what condition the cover is in. You know whether it has a lock. You know what words are written inside and whether those words have the power to hurt or even to kill. To you, it's no longer just a diary. It's the diary—the one you've pictured and pondered and imbued with life-changing importance. When you finally start to put this thing you created into words, you have to step outside your head far enough to remember that the Reader hasn't spent the last year or two getting cozy with the diary. It's the writer's job to put it in the Reader's hands—to bridge the gap between a state of unknowing and a state of knowing. That's what writing is.

The same applies to nonfiction writers. But unlike the novelist or short story writer who imagined the diary, the nonfiction writer may have actually seen the diary. The writer has a huge amount of information that the Reader does not—everything from the color to the size to the coffee cup rings on the diary cover to the crisp neatness of the handwriting within. To the nonfiction writer, it is unmistakably the diary. But she has some work to do before she can make the Reader feel some of the intimacy that makes it more than just a diary.

Of course, there are ways to reconcile a the before an unfamiliar item. The best way is to explain immediately after the item. One of the best devices for doing this is a relative clause. Relative clauses, which we know postmodify nouns, can come soon after a word to add description or clarity to it:

Katie screamed and grabbed the diary that her mother had given her.

Ta-da! The little relative clause that her mother had given her tells the reader more than just who gave Katie the diary. It tells the Reader, "Here's your explanation. Here's what you need to know to be up to speed on this diary. Here's why you can now feel some ownership of it, why you can now think of it not as a diary but as the diary."

I realize this is a lot of rumination about one little word, but this stuff is worth thinking about. For one thing, the cuts straight to the heart of Reader-serving writing. A badly used the happens because the writer got too wrapped up in what she was trying to say and forgot to be sensitive to the person she was saying it to.

And if you doubt that the has unique importance, consider this: It's the only word in the English language that is its own part of speech. It's in a category all its own.

The is called the definite article. It's distinct from a and an, which are called indefinite articles, and it's distinct from this and these, which are called demonstratives.

The stands alone.

So, now that I've thoroughly slammed using the to refer to stuff heretofore unknown to the Reader, how can we explain an all-too-common use of the like the one found in the very first sentence of the novel Travels in the Scriptorium, by Paul Auster?

The old man sits on the edge of the narrow bed, palms spread out on his knees, head down, staring at the floor.

Auster has not yet introduced the old man. He didn't say an old man. He didn't say there is an old man. He hasn't told us there exists an old man, or a bed or a floor either, for that matter. This is the first sentence of the whole novel. The the suggests that we've already been introduced to the character and his surroundings, even though we have not. Yet it simply does not have the power to irk the Reader the way our diary did. What's up with that?

Simple. It's the flip side of the same coin. If the suggests familiarity, then putting the in front of something so surely unfamiliar suggests that familiarity will come. It foreshadows. It teases. The Reader knows that the writer is going to explain who the old man is. The writer is asking for the Reader's trust and promising something in return. It's a great device that skillful writers use all the time. It demonstrates the power of the. And it illustrates the importance of staying attuned to your Reader.