The new topic/stress principle: Topic is concrete, stress abstract

Recall the sequence (concrete to abstract, near to far):

conversation – informal prose – formal prose – poetry

Formal prose is a style of writing that evolved—primarily to serve abstract matters, where clarity is the central virtue—to exploit the specific virtues of written discourse. It is far-mode clarity that is most prized in this style; near-mode is essential but subordinate. To subordinate near to far, formal prose uses a characteristic device at various structural levels: new matter is introduced in far mode and developed in near mode.

At the sentence level, this is accomplished by an application of topic/stress segmentation: the stress—which introduces important new information—is abstract; the topic—which recapitulates old information—is concrete.

Definitions and principles

In formal prose (which includes the most effective legal-brief writing), the topic (usually the sentence subject) announces what the sentence is about, often through association with previous information. The stress position (I’ll continue using the term despite the technical misnomer) refers to the last word or words before a period, colon, semicolon, and sometimes a dash; it contains important new information. (We know this about topic and stress mainly due to the work of Joseph Williams and George Gopen.)

Construal-level theory links concreteness to psychological proximity and abstractness to psychological distance. In sentence processing, the topic’s position is near and the stress’s position is far, and formal prose not only honors the topic and stress positions, their contents are typically concrete and abstract respectively, to correspond with their near and far locations in the sentence. New information is first presented abstractly in the stress position and then developed concretely by being recapitulated in a more specific form in the topics of subsequent sentences.

A counter-example?

The reader expects the topic to be concrete and the stress abstract, and each receives greatest emphasis when they satisfy the expectation. This observation answers a counterexample offered by Wayne Schiess, purporting to show that the topic is more important than the stress:

To me, number one emphasizes President Bush more. 

(1) President Bush made mistakes.

(2) Mistakes were made by President Bush.

Addressing Wayne’s argument fills a lacuna in topic/stress theory: what determines the stress-position’s size? Although “President Bush” constitutes a terminal phrase in number two, that phrase—referencing a near-mode concrete particular rather than a far-mode disposition—isn’t well suited to receive stress. The reader expands the stress position to encompass a suitable abstraction, which it finds in the sentence’s predicate, “were made,” which the sentence emphasizes.

(Generalizations like this new topic/stress principle are often best used to sharpen intuition rather than to replace it. I don’t think it would have occurred to me that number two emphasizes the predicate without its aid, but once I’ve applied the principle, the intuition perseveres.)

Rewriting the “writing rules”

The new topic/stress principle grounds, consolidates, and corrects several established “writing rules.”

Avoid nominalization is one-sided over-reaction; nominalization creates far-mode abstractions, commonly suitable in the stress but not, such as to supplement an excessively abstract verb, in the topic’s vicinity.

Favor agents as subjects is a simplistic rendition of formal-prose’s preference for concrete topics.

Concrete examples should precede new abstractions describes a practice in the (informal, near-mode) plain style, unsuited for formal prose.

“Stress position” is a misnomer: Explaining structural emphasis

The practice of locating important new information at the end of a proposition (the “stress position”) is undervalued and misunderstood by most writing authorities, and in actual legal writing, it is rare. The widespread ignorance of the “fundamental principle of advanced writing” is illustrated by a major legal-writing teacher’sremarkable comment: “This is surely subjective, and some will disagree, but I generally teach my students to use the beginnings of sentences (and of paragraphs and of entire documents) as stress positions.” Locating what belongs in the stress position at the beginning of a sentence (the “topic”) is the most common way the stress position is ignored in professional writing.

Why hasn’t topic/stress practice penetrated professional writing? One reason I’ve suggested is that its exponents haven’t provided a compelling explanation for why stress position is emphatic; the very term “stress position” is a misnomer insofar as it is based on the stress patterns of English phonology. The most obvious point to make against the phonological theory is that English declarative sentences, in fact, don’t end in rising pitch—questions do. More importantly, where in the sentence pitch rises and where it falls depends on phonological vagaries, and for previously mentioned reasons, as well, it’s implausible that one of the two principal structural means for creating emphasis in English (the other being brevity) depends on the language’s peculiarities.

A more promising explanation is provided by Thomas and Turner, who explain stress position as deriving from an intellectual schema modeling discourse on a journey where paramount, corresponding to the stress, is destination; and a second prominent point, corresponding to the topic, is the origin. (Clear and simple as the truth (2^nd ed. 2011), at p. 64.) In the Thomas and Turner view, respect for the stress position is an aspect of formal prose. But as an explanation for the role of the stress position in formal writing, it’s insufficient: it doesn’t explain why formal writing pervasively uses a particular intellectual schema, that of a journey.

Thomas and Turner have it right that the explanation for the stress position should be found, not in the idiosyncrasies of specific languages, but in the logic of formal prose. Stress position is part of the formal-writing strategy, and it transcends specific languages. (Mystifyingly, Thomas and Turner describe the “stress position” as a phenomenon specific to English.) “Stress position” isn’t an outgrowth of phonological patterns in ordinary conversation, which predominantly relies for emphasis on body language and spontaneous modulation of pitch and rhythm.

Formal prose is a specific style, one accentuating far-mode; it is a style serving to evoke receptivity to abstraction, since formal prose serves discourse about abstractions. “Far-mode” is a construct in construal-level theory, which correlates perceived physical and logical distance with abstract conceptualization. Construal-level theory entails that readers construe the beginning of a sentence concretely and its end abstractly, since, at the point where they activate a schema for understanding the sentence, its beginning (the topic) is near and the end (the stress) is far. By locating it at the end, the writer fosters an abstract construal of important new information. As a byproduct of this technique for fostering abstraction, the formal writer also gains a structural signal for importance. 

“Formal” and “informal” writing differ in word order

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.

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: 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.