A Word on the Words

OF the many things I’m not good at, small talk is the most embarrassing.

When someone says: “It’s raining again” (or something similar) I never know if they like it or hate it. I usually say: “Yes, it’s very Scottish” and this seems to satisfy.

I met a lady recently who had read my Word On The Words scribbles. It was a delight to miss out the small talk and instantly start a conversation on sentence construction.

The standard English sentence goes: subject-verb-object. The cat (subject) sat (what is it doing) on the mat (mat is the object, on is the preposition indicating what the subject is doing, the is the definite article).

It is simple and might even be described as elegant. We are in no doubt what is happening.

Some sentences, however, go on for ages. Worse, they lack punctuation to steer you from clause to clause so you soon become entirely lost.

Good writing is built of well-made sentences, which are easy to understand and leave you in no doubt about who did what to whom, when, where and why.

The words should be interesting and could even be exotic. But the mark of a good piece is its ability to describe even complicated matters in easy-to-read sentences.

If you can crack that skill, you’ve got every chance of having one of the world’s greatest compliments given to you: he (or she) is a good writer.