Starting at the Beginning, or God Bless Joseph Williams

When I was in graduate school, I got a “D” on one of my first papers and my professor told me that I should consider dropping out of the program because my writing was incoherent. I was aghast. I had always gotten As in high school and thought I was a good writer, not great but good.

When I asked the professor for suggestions about how to improve, he must have thought the task hopeless and was less than forthcoming. Since there was no way I was dropping out, I decided to teach myself how to write what I now realize was academic or expository prose. In high school, we had focused mainly on narratives, with the emphasis on telling a good story. But stories weren’t going to get me my degree. That was pretty clear.

Thus began a long struggle to learn how to write by studying what was considered good writing in academia. Along the way, I must have read—and still read—books on how to write. I found a lot of them useless, filled with general advice about the importance of things like clarity and coherence. That was all fine, but my question was this: What was a concrete way to achieve those things?

At some point in my search, I picked up a copy of Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams and saw what I had been looking for: step-by-step explanations on how to achieve clarity and coherence. In a marvelously straightforward fashion, Williams explained how to use sentence openings to keep readers following along as they moved from sentence to sentence. That advice can be summed up in a German proverb used in the book: “Beginning and end shake hands with each other. “

One key point Williams makes is the importance of sentence openings as directives, guides or, as he says at one point, “orienters” to what follows. In other words, when writers open a sentence with the word “Allegedly,” or “As numerous studies show,” they already alert readers to how the information about to come up should be viewed, the first one with a bit of suspicion, the second as potentially sound evidence.

Just as important, it’s at the beginning of sentences that the writer tells a reader, here’s how this new information arriving in the sentence you are about to read links up with what you’ve just learned from the previous sentence, in other words, how the new sentence shakes hands with the old.

Here's a perfect example of two sentences shaking hands: “President John F. Kennedy was, as novelist Norman Mailer wrote, ‘our leading man.’ Young, charismatic, and handsome, the new chief executive was the first president born in the 20^th century.” Sentence 1 introduces the notion of Kennedy as a glamorous figure. Sentence 2 opens by telling the reader, we’re still talking about Kennedy’s leading man image and readers know that because the writer has used adjectives associated with glamorous leading men: They are likely to be “young, charismatic, and handsome.”

Guided by Williams’s advice, I continue to find new ways to teach reading and writing students about the importance of sentence openings. I have developed a chart identifying the various signals common sentence openers or orienters (the chart goes way beyond the more typical, “for example,” “however”) can supply. Anyone interested in seeing the chart, adding to it, creating their own, or explaining why they do or do not think sentences openings are an important element of teaching reading and writing, please do comment or reply.