CONTROL THE SUBJECT OF YOUR SENTENCE

from The Sweet Science by A.J. Liebling

Then Louis and his seconds ... appeared from a runway under the north stands and headed toward the ring. The first thing I noticed, from where I sat, was that the top of Louis's head was bald. He looked taller than I had remembered him, although surely he couldn't have grown after the age of thirty, and his face was puffy and impassive. It has always been so. In the days of his greatness, the press read menace in it. He walked stiff-legged, as was natural for a heavy man of thirty-seven, but when his seconds pulled off his dressing robe, his body looked all right. He had never been a lean man; his muscles had always been well buried beneath his smooth beige skin. I recalled the first time I had seen him fight---against Baer. That was at the Yankee Stadium, in September 1935, and not only the great ball park but the roofs of all the apartment houses around were crowded with spectators, and hundreds of people were getting out of trains at the elevated I.R.T. station, which overlooks the field, and trying to loiter long enough to catch a few moments of action. Louis had come East that summer, after a single year as a professional, and had knocked out Primo Carnera in a few rounds. Carnera had been the heavyweight champion of the world, when Baer knocked him out. Baer, when he fought Louis, was the most powerful and gifted heavyweight of the day, although he had already fumbled away his title. But this mature Baer, who had fought everybody, was frightened stiff by the twenty-one-year-old mulatto boy. Louis outclassed him. The whole thing went only four rounds. There hadn't been anybody remotely like Louis since Dempsey in the early twenties.

"How do I know what I'm going to say until I've said it?" Any number of writers have testified that IT IS IN THE ACT OF WRITING, THAT THE IDEA TAKES SHAPE. Not understanding this process often accounts for the common complaint: "I know what I mean, but I don't know how to say it." The point is that THE MEANING IS IN THE SAYING (or writing), and if a writer doesn't know how to say it, he doesn't know precisely what he means.

Be aware of the subject territory. The unit selection illustrates a basic quality of the English sentence: The subject of the sentence or the main clause usually comes at the beginning of the sentence before the verb and is seldom preceded by a lengthy construction. The front part of the sentence or main clause is "subject territory."

Make the subject concrete. The kinds of words you select for the subject of a clause/sentence help determine the whole course of the sentence. You can be more direct, to the point, and brief if you select a concrete subject--concrete in the sense that it stands for something that is real and can be touched, seen, or otherwise sensed. You should write "City people are moving to the suburbs" instead of "The urban population exhibits an increasing tendency to relocate in semirural areas."

A main clause is a group of words with a subject-verb combination that can stand as an independent unit. By itself, it can stand as a sentence. Example: He walked stiff-legged ... his body looked all right. A subordinate clause is a group of words with subject-verb combinations that cannotstand as an independent unit. Example: ...as was natural for a heavy man of thirty-seven...when his seconds pulled off his dressing robe.

ASSIGNMENT

A. Identify and mark (underline and annotate) the subjects (with S) and verbs (with V) in the unit selection. How many sentences had the subject come at the beginning before the verb? How many subjects are preceded by introductory construction of some length? How many subjects come after the verb? Write your answers in a brief statement.

B. Notice the absense of words like reason, cause, circumstances as subjects in the unit selection. These words are abstractions. They don't stand for anything that we can point to, can touch, or can see. They don't create the sense of vividness that concrete subjects do. Select a sentence from the unit selection and rewrite it using a word like reason, cause, circumstances for the subject. Note how the number of words you used compares with the number of words in the original?