Word selection: A new principle of emphasis in near-mode

”Never use a long word where a short one will do,” is often repeated and seemingly unobjectionable advice, whose failures reveal additional principles of emphasis. Previous entries have treated far-mode emphasis, but there is also a near-mode form: emphasis by word length.

Near-mode and far-mode is shorthand for concrete and abstract construal processes in Trope and Liberman’s construal-level theory. To extend construal-level theory to phenomena beyond those studied in the laboratory, the following distinction is particularly useful: whereas near-mode adds components, far-mode averages them. (Weaver, K., Garcia, S. M., & Schwarz, N., The Presenter’s Paradox (2012). Far-mode’s proportionality seeking is the foundation of the brevity principle of emphasis. A short word will emphasize each of its component phonemes more than will a long word. This pertains to Euphony, but words are the most elementary meaningful units. Because of the additive character of near-mode, readers expect longer words to contain more information. This inference is supported by language evolution, which some researchers conclude enforces standards of communicative efficiency under which long words are less predictable than short—by that measure, conveying more information.

Readers will expect more information from longer words. Short words typically have the merit of fluency, but a judicious dispensation of long words will prepare readers for informative words, which they might dwell on a few milliseconds longer.

An example of a word choice based on its length in this entry occurred in writing this sentence: “Far-mode’s proportionality seeking is the foundation of the brevity principle of emphasis.” I considered this wording: “the brevity principle governing far-mode emphasis, but a common preposition's sufficiency shows that it doesn’t convey rich information.

A related half-truth: “Short words are powerful.” The kernel of truth in this falsehood is found in a countersignaling process: when it is very obvious that a word is important, its importance is further enhanced by omitting the signal (long word), its superfluousness itself serving as a signal of heightened importance.

Near-mode emphasis also answers another question of editorial choice: when to use phrasal verbs rather than simple verbs. Simple verbs are favored for Concision and fluency, whereas phrasal verbs lend an air of informality. But the phrasal verb occasionally serves a legitimate purpose of emphasizing the predicate. Consider this sentence: The visitor entered the office and defenestrated the occupant’s cat. The longer “threw the cat out of the window” is an example of the minority of cases where the longer verb is more fluent because it mirrors the term’s informativeness.

Tight writing is generally better than loose writing. Why? The most obvious reason is Concision, but the weightier factor is fluency—an aspect of Clarity. This analysis of near-mode emphasis explains the greater fluency of tight writing, which is due to omission of misleading cues about the informativeness of particular words. This theory of near-mode emphasis clarifies the distinction between emphases in the two modes. Near-mode emphasis concerns the amount of information; far-mode emphasis, degree of relevance.

Psychological roots of writers’ resistance to clarity

Most lawyers disregard the most useful principle of advanced writing: put new important matter at the sentence end (the stress position). This neglect itself provides insight into the nature of the resistances to clear professional and intellectual writing.

We should first be exact about the degree to which writing authorities ignore the stress position. Bryan Garner represents the mainstream, and he cites six other authorities for this advice: “To write forcefully, end sentences with a punch.” (The Winning Brief, Tip 36.) Garner concretizes his advice in an injunction against ending sentences with a date, citation, client’s name, or qualifying phrase. (Garner, perplexingly, also suggests the test of exaggerating the last word in each sentence while reading aloud. “If the reading sounds foolish then the sentence probably needs to be recast.” Garner’s emphasis on how the sentence sounds will prove instructive, but even anticipating that Garner’s test will misidentify many bad sentences as good, it will also misidentify good sentences as bad—simply because the stress position is more extensive than the final word.)

Garner understates the importance of emphasis by limiting stress-position errors to missed opportunities; he ignores the more important errors of misdirection—as do his six supporting authorities. Emphasis is underappreciated (unemphasized) by most authorities; distinguishing the important from the unimportant is central to grasping meaning, never itself exact but capable only of approximation. Why is it hard to understand that misleading emphasis compromises not just “forcefulness” but clarity?

Since clarity arises from emphasis, forcefulness is clarity. Here may lay the problem: the quest for clarity is inevitably imbued with the human ambivalence toward exercise of power—of which influence is a kind.

Writing aspiring to clarity and to apportioned emphasis—regardless of whether it succeeds in either—is often termed “formal”; yet defining formality has proven elusive. One recent attempt is found in James W. Pennebaker’s book The Secret Life of Pronouns, which distinguishes from the analytic and narrative writing styles a formal style. But Pennebaker is able to characterize formality only pejoratively: humorless, pompous, and stiff; Pennebaker finds formal style correlated with aspirations to social status. The associations in Pennebaker’s work between clarity and power are striking: influence, status, emphasis, forcefulness, pomposity, even “stiffness.” Pennebaker expresses human ambivalence to power by defining “formal” writing by its failures.

Expressing this same ambivalence, writers who seek that variety of power called intellectual influence confront emotional impediments to mastering formal writing (“classic prose”). Resistance to recognizing the stress-position’s importance—stress or emphasis equaling force or power—epitomizes this internal conflict. Imprecision stimulates the affiliative appetite for conversation, a taste writers seeking legal persuasiveness or intellectual influence must forgo.

Constructing sentences for precise emphasis: The fundamental principle of advanced writing

A legal-writing authority advises:

 View your reader as a companionable friend—someone with a warm sense of humor and a love of simple directness. Write like you're actually talking to that friend, but talking with enough leisure to frame your thoughts concisely and interestingly. John R. Trimble, Writing with Style 73 (2d ed. 2000). (HT: Bryan Garner, Usage Tip of the Day, November 12, 2013.)

Some writers hail Trimble’s advice as profound, while others ignore it as meaningless, but I hold it is quite wrong. Legal-brief writing (like other efforts at exerting intellectual influence) differs from conversation not just in degree: influential intellectual writing differs from conversation in its guiding formal virtue. Whereas good conversation is (or seems) spontaneous, good writing is clear.

One way the difference manifests is that competent writers force important new ideas to the sentence’s end. The last word or tight phrase preceding the point of syntactic closure (period, semicolon, or colon) is termed by Joseph M. Williams (Style: Toward Clarity and Grace) the stress position; and according to another student of sentence structure, George D. Gopen (A new approach to legal writing), failure to exploit the stress position is legal-writers’ single greatest formal weakness: out of hundreds of lawyers Gopen has trained, the stress position was properly used by a handful. Proper use of the stress position is at the threshold of competent writing, but misuse of the stress position doesn’t always sound bad. Locating trivia in the stress position produces limp sentences, but often lawyers fill the stress position with misleading substantive language. When a document contains sentences with misleading emphases, readers—due to conflicting cues about what’s important—find the document’s meaning hazy.

The stress position isn’t unique to written English; spoken English sentences end in higher pitch, but in spoken English, stress position is subordinate to nonverbal cues. It is also subordinate to standard word order, which conversation usually follows because reorganized sentences sound contrived, violating the conversational norm favoring spontaneity. Take as an example the previous paragraph’s final sentence, which trades moderate disfluency for high clarity:

When a document contains sentences with misleading emphases, readers—due to conflicting cues about what’s important—find its meaning hazy.

This is too contrived for good conversation; without the engineered word order, we might say:

Readers find a document’s meaning hazy, due to conflicting cues about what’s important, when it contains sentences with misleading emphases.

The talk version beats the clear version in cognitive fluency (and in apparent spontaneity), but it loses in clarity (partly) because of its misuse of the stress position. Hazy meaning is the sentence’s key contribution, whereas the talk version stresses misleading emphases, an idea previously introduced. Stress position isn’t the only way reorganized sentence structure departs from talk, but Gopen’s experience indicates that, in legal writing, it’s the most ignored. Exploiting the stress position requires sentences differing from talk.

Haziness takes a toll on all argumentative writing; in abstract endeavors, it detracts from thought itself. With clarity being much about emphasis, reorganizing sentence structure is a medium through which clear writing deepens thought. (“Plain-talk writing” is inherently inimical to clear thought.)

In the next entries, I’ll discuss how and why the importance of Williams and Gopen’s discovery of the stress position is almost invariably missed by writing authorities. Resistance to exploiting the stress position will be seen rooted in a misguided attachment to the pragmatics of talk. We will also see that clear writing’s difference from talk has implications for … you guessed it, the comma. It supplies the last big piece to the comma puzzle.

Emphasis by brevity of sentences, paragraphs, and sections

To emphasize an idea, put it in a short sentence. To emphasize a sentence, put it in a short paragraph. To emphasize a paragraph, put it in a short section. In general,

Readers will give information relative emphasis in inverse proportion to its density.

I haven’t seen this principle articulated, and it only became apparent to me through the lens of construal-level theory; although the tip to use very short sentences for occasional emphasis is a commonplace, to use long sentences for de-emphasis isn’t. That the principle hasn’t been generalized might be because the effect is often subtle: it is only one of at least five means of emphasis, but a more interesting reason that the effect has gone unnoticed will emerge, in that the construal processes explaining emphasis by brevity also explain why writers aren’t apt to notice.

I’ll begin with an example at the sentence level. Compare this very long sentence to the constituent propositions:

With capitalism’s evolution, a decreasing proportion of the value produced is constituted of labor directly employed, an increasing proportion from labor already concretized in capital goods, since mechanization of production is the fundamental means to increasing economic efficiency, where capital goods contribute to the value of a product to the extent they are consumed in its production. (Context: Juridical Coherence.)

The simple ideas the sentence contains, such as that mechanization of production is the fundamental means to increasing economic efficiency, are commonplace ideas others have expounded at length. To subordinate their importance to the ideas I deemed novel, I demoted them by including them in one complex sentence.

Construal-level theory explains why emphasis by brevity works, by the low granularity of far-mode. The theory predicts and experiments find that reading occurs in far-mode, whereas writing occurs in near-mode (I conclude that the latter is lamentable), where far-mode apprehends in global units as we see from afar. In far-mode, each sentence has equal value; the more thoughts occurring in a sentence, the less the relative value of each. The theory also explains why emphasis by relative brevity isn’t common knowledge. Even while writing in far-mode, the writer is nearer his work than the reader because the self-other axis is a major dimension of construal level, and in near-mode, the longer sentence is more important than the shorter, rather than the reverse—near-mode adds when far-mode averages.

The phenomenon of emphasis by brevity confirms some standard writing advice and rebuts other standard advice. Commentators have expressed surprise at the degree to which variation in sentence length improves comprehension, suggesting more is at work than maintaining interest by variety. Varying sentence length makes writing clear by informing the reader how important the writer regards each component idea.

The misguided advice includes limiting sentences to one idea, implying writers should avoid compound sentences (and semicolons). Compound sentences serve to de-emphasize the ideas they contain, so their avoidance sacrifices emphatic contrast. Other misguided advice concerns paragraphs. Consistently short paragraphs have the same leveling effect on importance as consistently short sentences. And routine use of separate paragraphs for transitions between paragraphs is bad practice because the merely transitional usually doesn’t merit emphasis.

For a document’s sections, one all-too-common practice gravely offends against construal-level theory. A conclusion is almost mandatory in legal briefs and is necessarily short, but nonetheless, the emphasis it receives is often bestowed on a platitude with an initial “whereas,” in all caps no less. The better practice is to reserve a memorable idea for the short concluding section.

Emphasis by typography

Attorneys often use boldface (and italics) to emphasize arguments, an overdone practice if it should be done at all. Yet typographical emphasis seems effective in blog writing. Exploring the reason for the difference might help refine the usage of typographical emphasis in briefs—or preclude it.

Bloggers use typographical emphasis effectively to highlight key claims, but claims are rarely key in a legal brief. Blog writing is an exercise in originality of conception, so it’s incumbent on the blogger to draw attention to those original conclusions, whereas legal briefing should seek to minimize the appearance of being original. What warrants emphasis in briefs is argument, not conclusion. Succinct conclusions are easily emphasized. But every part of an argument is equally important objectively, and which part is most important subjectively depends on the reader, so emphasizing part of an argument typographically creates a sense of non sequitur, since the bolded argument doesn't pull its weight. Various parts of the argument are more important for different readers, the emphasized passage or words miscuing them. Typography is too crude a technique for emphasizing parts of an argument, which must display the precise relationships among its parts in nuanced fashion.

Legal writers usefully emphasize headings typographically, but bolded headings must function as headings if they are to avoid the heavy-handedness of bolding parts of arguments. Rather than state part of the following argument, they should summarize or describe the section of text they govern.

There’s also a more speculative reason why bolding body text might always be a bad idea for legal briefs: it may subtly offend the judge by violating a status formality, an informal rule designed to protect the judge’s status. One of the common demands of rules of status formality in courtrooms is that lawyers must always avoid making their own work easier at the expense of making the judge’s work harder. Since it is actually a bit harder to read boldface than roman text, this status formality might apply, the author having other means of emphasis that don’t burden the judge. 

Emphasis: Prosody or Grammar

Various devices can impart emphasis:

1. Emphatic and de-emphatic language
2. Specialized punctuation (dash and colon)
3. Short-sentence exceptions
4. Typography 
5. End (stress) position in sentence
6. Hierarchic grammatical relationship (supposedly)

Numbers 5 and 6 are this entry’s concern.

The end position in a sentence was dubbed the stress position by Joseph M. Williams, according to whom the two most important parts of a sentence are its beginning, where the reader expects the sentence’s topic grounded in old information, and its end, where the reader expects new information. Written language’s acknowledgement of the orally emphatic end position is a concession to prosody; sentence position rather than grammatical relationships determine written as well as spoken emphasis. Although grammar trumps prosody on punctuation, prosody trumps grammar on emphasis.

Joseph M. Williams best explains the connection between sentence position and emphasis, but he isn’t alone in concluding that the end position is emphatic. Citing six supporting authorities, Bryan Garner counsels, “To write forcefully, end your sentences with a punch.” (The Winning Brief, 36.)

To Garner I turn now for the view that subordination connotes de-emphasis. Garner replaces the meaningless demand to limit every sentence to a single idea with the formalistic one to limit them to a single main idea, which Garner equates with the sentence’s main clause—where Garner advocates putting important information. For Garner, subordination is de-emphasis:

As Trimble suggests, convert a “starveling”—a short sentence that says little—into a subordinate clause and merge it with another sentence. (The Winning Brief, 40.)

Elsewhere, Garner derogates subordinate clauses when he advises giving them separate sentences if they state important arguments.

One reason to question that grammatical relationship imparts emphasis is that its doing so conflicts with number 5, using the end position for emphasis, since that's where (supposedly de-emphasized) subordinate clauses usually occur. Garner’s four examples of combining sentences by subordination avoid the conflict by moving the subordinate clause to the beginning. But this surprising word order shouldn’t be routine.

Putting the main clause in the stress position, as in Garner’s rewrites, comports with Garner’s teaching that the main clause should contain information more important than the subordinate clause contains. But the following example shows that the subordinate clause can rightly be more informative, while Garner’s analysis, equating “subordinate” with “less important,” leads to putting it not in the most forceful position at the sentence’s end. Garner’s rewrites reveal the problem with Garner’s approach: a subordinate clause may properly contain a sentence’s most important information, and then it usually belongs at the sentence’s end. Consider one of Garner’s rewrites:

The original. Third, there are no extraordinary circumstances to support setting aside the court’s judgment. Consequently, there is no basis either to reconsider the Court’s decision or to grant Reynolds leave to amend his complaint.

Garner’s rewrite. Third, in the absence of extraordinary circumstances, the Court should not reconsider its decision or grant Reynolds leave to amend his complaint.

Garner misplaces the emphasis. Instead, stress-locate the subordinate structure:

My rewrite. Third, the Court should not reconsider its decision or grant Reynolds leave to amend his complaint in the absence of extraordinary circumstances.

Despite its subordinate grammatical status, “in the absence of extraordinary circumstances” receives the greatest emphasis. This seems right, since it’s a trivial move from no extraordinary circumstances to the lack of basis to reconsider.

Garner’s approach reveals the harm of equating subordination with lesser importance. If, like Garner, you also recognize that the final element is stressed, you’ll be reluctant to put subordinate elements at the end of sentences, with two adverse consequences: 1) you’ll overutilize a sentence pattern that doesn’t start with the subject, and 2) you’ll underutilize the stress position.

The language has good reason to accord emphasis to the stress position rather than to main clauses; grammatical hierarchy has another function, that of expressing factual and logical dependence. In the example above, “No exceptional circumstances” presents as a condition limiting a legal rule, and the rule belongs in the main clause because it's logically fundamental. But the condition, “no extraordinary circumstances,” is the argument’s real point, and it belongs in the stress position, despite being grammatically subordinate.

Dash or colon: Does the tail wag the dog?

The preceding entry concerned paired em-dashes setting off digressions. A single dash may set off a sentence-terminating digression, but in another usage, the single dash replaces a colon to introduce explanation rather than digression. Which—colon or dash—should writers favor?

Among writing academics are partisans of the colon and those of the dash, as well as neutrals. Often the criterion is register—the colon designated formal, the single dash informal—but formality doesn’t necessarily recommend usage. Legal-writing authority Professor John R. Trimble takes a distinctive position, favoring the dash over conjunctive colons because colons look overly formal (“studied”). Trimble may have over-generalized from the correct observation that the colon is overkill when the matter’s explanatory character is obvious without it, as in this sentence:

There are two parties to a sales contract—buyer and seller.

A colon would induce excessive expectations.

Another warrant for the dash in the last (italicized) example sentence is that emphasis doesn’t fall on the explanatory matter following. The colon emphasizes what follows, a pair of dashes what they enclose, but the single dash emphasizes what precedes, an emphasis writers can exploit to offset the dramatic character of what follows. This effect can trick an observer into concluding that the dash, not the meaning of what follows it, provides terminal emphasis, as here:

Employing a single em dash in a sentence commands your readers' attention, enticing them forward—c'mon, reader, let's go see what'z over here! It can also lend particular force to a terminal phrase—really it will!

Using a non-dramatic termination as paradigm, another authority correctly concluded that the single dash is backward looking, the colon forward looking: “The effect of a colon is to lead the reader forward into the following section. A dash is more like a bucket of cold water flung in the reader's face, jolting them back to the starting point of the sentence.” The perspicuous sample sentence was:

Hamlet's indecisiveness, his arrogance, his suspicion of others, his passionate, brooding, introspective nature—these all contribute to his downfall.

The misperception that the single dash emphasizes the following digression also overgeneralizes from paired dashes’ digressive emphasis. The distinction lies deep in the shape of the punctuation marks, rather than only in convention. Symmetric dashes make the enclosed matter salient, whereas a single dash makes what follows an afterthought: it looks like a tail, and everyone knows the tail doesn’t wag the dog.

The colon: When the explanation is more important than what’s explained

Each punctuation mark serves a core function, and usage should follow the core function whenever the rules governing that function are applicable. Disputed Issues has considered the core functions of several punctuation marks: The comma sets off nonrestrictive elements; the semicolon neutrally connects independent clauses; and the dash emphasizes matter tangential in its immediate context. Following the core functions means eschewing rules unrelated to the core function unless the core function is unrelated to the construction. To take the comma, usage guides sometimes state the rule that a comma doesn't set off an adverbial clause at the end of a sentence, but the restrictive - nonrestrictive distinction the writer should apply eviscerates the rule.
The core function is the main function for ordinary discursive text. The colon has a variety of uses, such as exemplification by lists, but the central discursive use of the colon is to substitute for a word like because to create a clause more central than the independent clause to which it would be subordinated. From the opposite end of the grammatical telescope, the colon demotes the independent clause to a parenthetical role.
Here's an example:

Density is audience relative: the optimal density for experts is higher than for novices; but density's audience relativity isn't as great as you might think.

Grammatically, an adverbial clause could substitute for the clause following the colon:

Density is audience relative because the optimal density for experts is higher than for novices; but density's audience relativity isn't as great as you might think.

The colon serves better than the adverb, since the matter in the because clause is more important than what precedes, which only creates a transition through a more general proposition; the more important propositions shouldn't ordinarily be subordinated to the less important. The clause following the colon becomes independent when the colon is substituted, but this happenstance doesn't affect the colon's usage; a subordinate clause can follow the colon, and the independent clause's significance would remain parenthetical.