Not incessantly
but at least occasionally, unobtrusively yet obviously—formal
writing hovers on the edge of awkwardness. This is unremarked by the
authorities, as is the explanation: formal writing’s proclivity to violate
standard word order.
Standard word order in English
Contemporary
English language is intermediate among languages in the rigidity of its word
order, neither strictly obligatory like Latin nor absent like Chinese. (Owen
Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in
Meaning (1984).) Perhaps this averageness conceals the pragmatic importance
of word order in English, but a hallmark of formal writing (“classic
prose”) is that it sacrifices
“Naturalness” for “Succinctness,” which is to say, cognitive
fluency for cohesiveness and proportioned emphasis.
The standard English
word order is:
Subject – Verb – Object – Adverbial modifiers
This standard
word order is obeyed more consistently in informal writing because writing that
takes conversation as its model is inspired by the ideal
of spontaneity, an impression contrived word order subverts.
Here’s an
example of a sentence written for proportioned
emphasis and rewritten for conversationality.
California may be unique in unconstitutionally allowing its attorney guild to enforce its self-adjudicated costs as a judgment, but the universal state-bar practice of charging costs to respondents (regardless of how the state bars can collect them) derives from changes in the criminal law that, despite their legality, damage the system’s integrity: policies of victim restitution and social restitution.
California may be unique in unconstitutionally allowing its attorney guild to enforce its self-adjudicated costs as a judgment, but the universal state-bar practice of charging costs to respondents (regardless of how the state bars can collect them) derives from changes in the criminal law that damage the system’s integrity despite their legality: policies of victim restitution and social restitution.
In the formal or “classic prose” version, the adverbial
modifier “despite their legality” is placed after the subject and before the
verb of the subordinate that clause.
In the conversational rendition, the
modifier occurs in the stress position preceding the colon, the standard English
word order. The classic-prose version is clearer because “damage the system’s
integrity,” which occupies the stress position, adds the most important new
information. But because breaching standard English word order is disfluent, the
classic-prose version is slightly awkward.
Recouping fluency with the comma
Formal writing
is awkward in the manner of poetry. One reason (not the only reason) poetry is harder to read
than prose is that it takes liberties with the standard English word order. In
its sacrifice of fluency for emphasis, formal writing is intermediate between
oral conversation and poetry:
Oral conversation – Informal writing – Formal writing – Poetry
Offsetting its often
novel word order, poetry has means of recouping some measure of cognitive
fluency: verse and rhyme. Classic prose’s palliative is the lowly comma. In the
classic-prose version, the displaced
modifying phrase is set off by commas despite its restrictive
character. Glimpses of this important use of the comma can be seen in rules
concerning “interruptive phrases,” but in the conversational
example, the despite phrase
isn’t interruptive. It’s just out of order. Another partial application of the
principle that violations of standard word order call for commas is the rule to
set off a periodic sentence’s introductory modifiers.
Remaining issues
Allowing the
nature of contemporary English, occupying a middle ground between structured
and unstructured language, it remains odd that the standard authorities have
failed to notice this distinguishing difference between formal and informal
writing, but some responsibility may fall to certain gaps in Joseph M. Williams
and George D. Gapon’s topic/stress theory of sentence organization: 1) the stress position is said to be unique
to English; and 2) it originated in conversation.
These two facts raise
theoretical problems. If stress position is critically important for emphasis
in English, do other languages each have their own idiosyncratic means of
emphasis? This seems dubious: if language were inherently inclined to developing
syntactic cues to emphasis, it’s unlikely that only English would have seized
on stress position and topic/stress structure, whose congruence with general
primacy/recency effects is unlikely to be coincidental. The other fact, the
origin of stress position in oral communication, is in tension with the
observation that formal writing accentuates use of the stress position: why was
the limited usefulness of stress
position in oral communication, which is aided immeasurably by nonverbal
communication, sufficient to secure that position’s role?
I leave these
issues for future treatment.
