Making syntax work for your writing

Continuing our summer series on Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style, I must admit I was not enthused to read the syntax chapter, replete with sentence diagrams. However, it did remind me of many of the syntax tricks I use in my own writing that I outline below. Although I won't be showing you any word trees (you're welcome), I will abbreviate some of Pinker's discussion to offer you some quick tips for maintaining good syntax.

Asking too much of your reader
One of the most common syntax faux pas is when a writer asks the reader to keep the subject of a sentence in their mind while leading them through tangential clauses before they conclude with the predicate. For example:

My best friend, Brian, whose sister's birthday was last week and wanted to go to dinner with their family, is busy on Thursday.

Here, I'm trying to say "Brian is busy Thursday," but to say that I lead my reader through a twisted and unnecessary path and ask them to bear the subject, Brian, in their mind until I get back to my original point and offer my reader a predicate, is busy on Thursday. Even though my example is silly, I encourage you to not test your readers' memories in one sentence. Find ways to write things where you're not placing the subject and predicate of your sentence far apart.

Coordination
Coordination, when it comes to syntax, refers to the aligning of tenses and plurals in a sentence. So when I say, The choir sing nicely, something sounds off and we realize that I have not coordinated my subject and my verb and it should be The choir sings nicely because choir is singular. This seems easy enough, but it's amazing how complicated it becomes when a sentence gets longer, with more clauses.

Take this NIH abstract example:

Lastly, we will assess the role that delinquency case dispositions (i.e., condition of probation) plays in the relationship between behavioral health service utilization and criminal recidivism.

In this example, plays is our verb in question. Do we see coordination in this example? The trick we use to check on coordination is to first figure out to what noun the verb is referring. When I first read this sentence, I thought it was referring to the role, in which case we're good, because the role plays is correct. But then I looked closer and decided that plays was referring to dispositions. We would never dream of saying dispositions plays because dispositions is plural.

What makes this example extra tricky is the parenthetical phrase condition of probation, which puts a singular noun, condition the closest to the verb in question, plays. Yet, using our trick of identifying which noun goes with our verb, we can then create an abbreviated sentence to check if we're using the right verb form, and in our example we're not. It should be play cause it's referring to dispositions.

Who vs. whom
I had a friend in high school who, when asked for on the phone, would reply, This is she. At the time, I thought it sounded pretentious, but of course (many) years later, when asked for Naomi on the phone, I reply with This is she, because my friend was correct. Figuring out the proper pronouns gets more difficult when we're talking about who and whom. Going back to our phone conversation, is it correct when someone says, Who's calling or what about Who are you trying to reach?

The trick to use for who and whom is to first categorize who and whom with like pronouns, as shown here:

Who: he, she, they
Whom: him, her, them

Next, we answer the question with one of the pronouns.

Who's calling? She is.
So, since she is in the same category as "who," "who" is correct here.
Who are you trying to reach? I'm trying to reach her.
Oops! Who and her are in different categories, so we need to correct our question to say, Whom are you trying to reach?

Using these syntax tricks can make your writing more readable and keep you out of trouble with the people who are always on the lookout for a grammar mistake. Below are a couple of resources. I downloaded the Grammarly App and so far it's been catching errors, although I noted that in our NIH example, it thinks that plays refers to condition. So, of course, we can never rely on these tools, but we can let them help us. The blog referenced below is a good place to go for quick and dirty grammar explanations. Happy, error-free writing to you!

Resources
Grammarly App
Grammar Girl Blog