Watch: Module 1 Introduction (5 min video)

Transcript

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When I teach writing, and I mostly teach to college students and older, I find that I’m often not teaching new skills nearly so much as I’m clearing away the clutter of bad habits to get back to fundamental skills that have been there all along. One of the amazing things about human language is that you have about a million ways to insert more and more information into a sentence.

You have nominative absolutes, you have noun clauses, adjective clauses, participial phrases. You got these subordinate conjunctions that convey all kinds of logical relationships between ideas. Now, why am I using all these big words? To impress you? Well, maybe. But another reason, the real reason, is so that you can be impressed with yourself. Because you can already do all this stuff. You’re probably quite good at cramming lots of information into a sentence. You might make the occasional grammar error, but if you’re a native speaker of English, I guarantee you get your grammar right almost all the time. But here’s the thing. At its heart, good vivid language, whether that’s written language or spoken language, isn’t so much about conveying information as it’s about rendering experience. And that’s something you learn to do very, very early. When you learn to talk, you start with concrete nouns, the things you can see and hear and touch. You start with words like mama and daddy and kitty and milk and car. And then before long you start adding verbs. The kitty says meow. Milk spilled. Daddy is funny. The car goes fast. And when you grow, you learn to use all kinds of grammatical structures. And through most of your education, your parents and your teachers are encouraging you to express more and more complex ideas with more and more complex grammatical structures.

You’re rewarded for showing that you can think in abstract terms. And by the way, this is appropriate. You do need to be able to think abstractly and when you’re little you can’t and when you grow you can and you need to be able to master the grammatical complexities that lets you communicate abstract ideas. So that movement from the concrete to the abstract is an essential part of your education when you’re young. But when it comes to writing it has a lot to do with bringing things from the abstract back down to the concrete. So this idea of all the grammatical complexities, all the abstract thinking, we are going to work on all those things in this course. But here in this first unit of Grammar for Writers, we’re going to go all the way back to that simplest, most straightforward way of rendering experience. Subjects, verbs, objects, complements. Who did what? Or, who did what to whom? The kind of writing that connects with the reader has to be solid at that level. The subjects are as concrete as possible. Your verbs are precise. Who did what? And by the That’s the way information comes to us in the real world. We see who did what to whom. Now, then we apply our logic, or we apply our judgment to decide to make logical connections or to pass judgment on people. But the way information comes to us is through our eyeballs, through our ears, maybe through our hands, the way we touch, the way we smell.

That’s the way information comes to us. Who did what? writing that is strong at that very simple level of subject, verb, object, complement feels true to your reader. The additional information, that can be important too, but you’ve got to get good at conveying that action to your reader. So here in this first module, we’re stripping away all the modifiers, all the subordinate clauses, everything but the main action that a sentence depicts. Who did what? We’re gonna build all that other stuff back in in the subsequent modules, but for now we’re going all the way back to some of the first things you learn to do with language when you’re a toddler. So here’s what here are the topics we’re going to cover in this module. I’m going to give you some tools for identifying the verb and the subject of a clause. I’m going to give you the tools for identifying direct objects and indirect objects. You’re going to learn about predicate complements, and hopefully I can make you care about the difference between action verbs and linking verbs. You’re going to learn the five possible patterns for the structure of a clause, and believe it or not there are only five. In all the complexity of English language, the basic structure of a clause is very rigid and very limited, and that’s a very good thing. We’re going to talk about passive voice. How to identify it. Why to avoid it. When it’s good to use it. We’re going to talk about nominalization. That’s the practice of turning verbs into abstract nouns. Again, we’re going to talk about especially why that’s dangerous on why that is not helpful to your reader. Although, like every other problematic structure in English, it exists because sometimes it’s exactly what you need. We’re gonna talk about strong verbs and why that advice, “Use strong verbs,” can be misleading. Okay, we’re gonna spend a lot of time talking about aligning the action of a sentence with the grammar of the sentence by making sure that the actions get expressed as verbs and the actors are the subject of those verbs.

And by the way, that idea, The idea of aligning the grammar, aligning the verbs, and the subjects with the action—that really is the central idea of this whole module. Everything else in this module is just a specific and/or a technical outworking of that idea. Actors and actions become subjects and verbs. Once you grasp and apply that idea, your writing will be transformed immediately. I promise you. So you’re going to see some progress in your writing very soon. All right, we’ve got a lot to cover in this module, so we better get started. [MUSIC PLAYING]