Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [258]
Although the art of the people was crude, it was original.
The art of the people was original, although it was crude.
Both sentences emphasize the idea in the main clause (“original”). Because the second version locates the “although” clause at the end, however, the subordinated idea (“crude”) has more emphasis than it does in the first version.
You can experiment with the meaning and style of virtually any sentence you write by reversing the clauses. Here, taken almost at random, is an earlier sentence from this chapter, followed by two such transformations.
When you put something in a subordinate clause, you make it less important than what is in the main clause.
Put information in a subordinate clause if you want to make it less important than what is in the main clause.
If you want to make information less important than what is in the main clause, put it in a subordinate clause.
As we hope you can see, the ordering of clauses is one way of according emphasis, the decision to subordinate or coordinate is another, and the two modes of emphasizing can work in tandem. Thus, a sentence that ends with a subordinate clause gives that clause more force than a sentence that contains a subordinate clause but does not end with it.
Try This 18.4: Experiment with Coordination, Subordination, and the Order of Clauses
Do two rewritings of the following sentence, changing the order of clauses and subordinating or coordinating as you wish. We recommend that you make one of them end with the word friendly.
Faculty members came to speak at the forum, and they were friendly, but they were met with hostility, and this hostility was almost paranoid.
How does each of your revisions change the meaning and emphasis?
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Parallel Structure: Put Parallel Information into Parallel Form
One of the most important and useful devices for shaping sentences is parallel structure or, as it is also known, parallelism. Parallelism is a form of symmetry: it involves placing sentence elements that correspond in some way into the same (that is, parallel) grammatical form. Consider the following examples, in which the parallel items are underlined or italicized:
The three kinds of partners in a law firm who receive money from a case are popularly known as finders, binders, and grinders.
The Beatles acknowledged their musical debts to American rhythm and blues, to English music hall ballads and ditties, and later to classical Indian ragas.
There was no way that the President could gain the support of party regulars without alienating the Congress, and no way that he could appeal to the electorate at large without alienating both of these groups.
In the entertainment industry, the money that goes out to hire film stars or sports stars comes back in increased ticket sales and video or television rights.
As all of these examples illustrate, at the core of parallelism lies repetition—of a word, a phrase, or a grammatical structure. Parallelism uses repetition to organize and emphasize certain elements in a sentence, so that readers can perceive more clearly the shape of your thought. In the Beatles example, each of the prepositional phrases beginning with to contains a musical debt. In the President example, the repetition of the phrase no way that emphasizes his entrapment.
Parallelism has the added advantage of economy: each of the musical debts or presidential problems might have had its own sentence, but in that case the prose would have been wordier and the relationships among the parallel items more obscure. Along with this economy come balance and emphasis. The trio of rhyming words (finders, binders, and grinders) that concludes the law-firm example gives each item equal weight; in the