Who’s in Charge here?: Active Constructions and Cohesion in Reader-Centered Writing

by Robb St. Lawrence, MFA/TA, English

In crafting reader-centered prose, writers confront two potentially contradictory ‘rules’ of style: use active constructions to make clearer sentences, and begin sentences with known information so that a reader can transition from known information to new information more smoothly. What follows is a brief explanation of the two rules in action.

ACTIVE SENTENCE CONSTRUCTIONS

Active sentence constructions are important to reader-centered writing because they maintain clarity of agency (who is doing things) and action (what they are doing) in a sentence. To illustrate, here’s a passive construction:

When a button is clicked, the information on the screen is changed by the user.

Here’s an active construction:

The user changes the information on the screen when she clicks a button.

The active construction moves the adverbial clause from the beginning of the sentence to the end, so that the reader first comes upon the subject (the agent doing things in the sentence, here, “the user”). Front-loading the subject helps keep the reader’s attention on the ‘characters’ in a piece of writing, which can help the reader to visualize that writing’s movement and the writer maintain the clarity of her thinking.

KNOWN TO NEW COHESION

Writers sustain cohesion between sentences and ideas in their writing by maintaining a consistent movement between known and new information, with the “known” word(s) from the preceding sentence repeated before new ideas are introduced. Notice how disjunctive the passage below seems when “new” words are introduced at the beginning of each sentence:

A designer can provide cues for how to interact with a site by providing visuals, like buttons. A user changes the information on the screen when she clicks a button. That user will be able to apply this knowledge to other points on an interface.

Now notice how much more smoothly the writing flows when the “known” word from the end of a sentence repeats at the beginning of the next:

A designer can provide cues for how to interact with a site by providing visuals, like buttons. When a button is clicked, the information on the screen is changed by the user. That user will be able to apply this knowledge to other points on an interface.

While the first example employs active constructions in each sentence, the dramatic shift in agents between “a designer” and “a user” creates a feeling of disjunction for a reader. The resulting lack of cohesion could act as a greater impediment to the flow than simply using the passive construction, as the second example shows.

So when composing an essay, which of these apparently contradictory rules takes precedence? Writers who work to craft reader-centered writings need to pay attention to both clarity of action and cohesion between sentences (managing the transition from known to new). But paying attention to both of these things can often mean using passive constructions that make the movement from known and new ideas more cohesive. In fact, Joseph Williams suggests that “that’s the biggest reason the passive is in the language: to arrange sentences so that they flow from one to the next easily” (76).

For more on style: Williams, Joseph M. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2005.