Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
This is the second in a series of writing lessons by the author.
If, as I said in my last article, the subject of a sentence is like the hull of a boat and the predicate like the sail or motor, then the raw material used to build the vessel is words — clear, strong, supple words. Our word choices give a sentence its luster, and they deserve intense attention.
Before focusing on these key materials, let’s quickly review English’s eight categories of words. The ancient Greeks and Romans first put forward the idea that there are “parts of speech,” and in the 18th century, British grammarians arrived at our slate of eight: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions and interjections.
Schoolteachers and lexicographers have generally accepted these parts of speech for the last two and a half centuries. The problem is that some words don’t always fit neatly into syntactical buckets. Is however, for example, an adverb, a conjunction, a conjunctive adverb or just a “transitional expression”? (Answer: it depends on whom you ask.) Other words fit into multiple categories. I can fancy (verb) a pair of leather boots, choose fancy (adjective) high heels, and entertain a fancy (noun) about being chic. Perfect fit or not, the parts of speech still give us a way to talk about words.
Many of us learned about the parts of speech from “Schoolhouse Rock,” which made its debut on ABC-TV in 1973 and lives today on YouTube. The series defines the parts of speech with catchy ditties like “Verb: That’s What’s a’Happenin’!” and “ Conjunction Junction.” “Schoolhouse Rock” tells us that a noun is a “special kind of word” (“It’s any name you ever heard”) and that it is “quite interesting” (“a person, place or thing”).
The problem with the show’s easy-to-remember definition is that nouns are more complicated, especially the ones we want to use in grown-up writing. The word itself derives from the Latin nomen, which means “name,” so it can indeed be useful to remember that nouns name people, places and things-you-can-taste-touch-see-smell-hear. But a noun can also name concepts, emotions and ideas. Math is a noun; so are melancholy and mission. The linguist Steven Pinker calls a noun “simply a word that does nouny things; it is the kind of word that comes after an article, can have an ’s stuck onto it, and so on.”
When we express ourselves, nouns are our foundation. Think about it: If we need to introduce ourselves to others, we rely on nouns, whether proper (Edmund) or common ones (a farmer’s son). We put them on our business cards (doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief), we use them for Web sites and Twitter handles (@Dr.WhoOnline) and we let them animate real or made-up epitaphs (“Here lies Dr. Keene, the good Bishop of Chester,/Who ate up a fat goose, but could not digest her.”).
Some among us use generic nouns when we are grasping for words to say who we are (female, doctor, athlete). When we write, though, we want to say as much as we can in as few words as possible, so we find specific nouns (mother, cardiologist, kayaker). Mother is better than female, because it reveals gender as well as personal information. But nouns like soccer mom, mother hen or matron say even more because they also give clues about age and attitude.
The best nouns, then, are concrete rather than abstract, specific rather than general. They are also evocative. To illustrate this, let’s return to boats. Some of the synonyms for boat, like vessel, are so vague they could apply to any means of transportation — or any container, for that matter. Commonplace nouns like boat, ship or sea craft are less abstract. But let’s get precise: how about scow, skiff, yacht and yawl? Brand names like Sunfish, Hobie Cat, Boston Whaler give even more concrete images, while other proper nouns, like the Titanic, the U.S.S. Kentucky and the Hokule‘a allow us to precisely picture an exact boat. Nouns help us paint a scene, understand a character or put a finger on a theme. It’s worth taking the time to get them right.
They are aided, of course, by adjectives, which when chosen judiciously make the description even more powerful. In a New Yorker story about truffle hunting in the Aug. 20, 2007, issue, the journalist Burkhard Bilger uses nouns and adjectives to give us a vision of the place where he sat down to rest:
“We’d wandered into a small glade open to the sky. A circle of shaggy sugar pines stood around it, like brooding hens, and gathered in the last of the day’s warmth.”
Adjectives and nouns work together here to transform a forest into a “small glade” surrounded by “shaggy sugar pines.” Bilger lodges his distinctive image in our minds by comparing the circle of pines to “brooding hens.”
In the novel “Solibo Magnificent,” the Caribbean writer Patrick Chamoiseau relies on nouns to nail the character of the sherbet vendor Antoinette Maria-Jésus Sidonise:
“She’s a small woman, with the flesh and the curves of her forty years atop a child’s fragility and finesse.”
Fragility and finesse belong in that final, important category of nouns that name ideas and concepts; in this description, they allow the writer to take physical details and turn them into psychological secrets.
Bad Habits
Writers sometimes forget that the primary role of nouns is to paint a clear picture, and they pile up abstractions and leave us clueless as to the people, places, things or ideas they are writing about.
Sometimes this is intentional, as when a spokesman for Hasbro said that the closing of a Scrabble plant in Fairfax, Vt., in 1999 was part of a “global improvement product enhancement program.”
Read more writing lessons by the author.
Other times, it is unintentional, as when novice writers goo up descriptions with a lot of lush adjectives, rather than a few precise nouns. When Homer first said “rosy-fingered dawn,” that was a striking description, but now it’s a cliché. Pile up the adjectives, and it gets even worse: “The thin, mauve fingers of dawn reached up over the flat, charcoal-gray horizon …”
The best writers combine killer nouns and adjectives, and they can make dawn — or any other sky — surprising. In “Bad Land,” a book about the settling and the abandonment of the Great Plains, the travel writer Jonathan Raban describes a lightning storm moving in from the west:
“One could see it coming for an hour before it hit: the distant artillery flashes on a sky of deep episcopal purple.”
That deep episcopal purple isn’t just original, it’s precise and carries rich associations.
Of course, even the very best nouns and adjectives are nothing without verbs. As we’ll see in my next article, verbs make nouns and adjectives spring into action.
One of the hardest things to describe in a fresh way is the sky — whether at dawn, at dusk or before a storm. In the comments section below, send us three sentences that paint a realistic picture of a sky using precise and surprising nouns and adjectives. We’ll post some of the best ones later this week.
Constance Hale, a journalist based in San Francisco, is the author of “Sin and Syntax” and the forthcoming “Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch.” She covers writing and the writing life at sinandsyntax.com.
Draft features essays by grammarians, historians, linguists, journalists, novelists and others on the art of writing — from the comma to the tweet to the novel — and why a well-crafted sentence matters more than ever in the digital age.
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