Coolkayer commented:

Alicia, perhaps you've already done this, but please consider a post on capitalization after a colon. Every time I think I've got it--if the post-colon portion of the sentence is a full sentence unto itself, capitalize--then I see someone not cap a full sentence, and once again, I'm sunk. It's better than he thought: He can run all day now. Or It's better than he thought: he can run all day now. (This example confuses me to no end as it might be a semicolon or an em-dash instead of a colon. Ugh!) Thanks! on Sentences: Why a clause? Why a comma? Rules bend for meaning construction

Good question! I think part of the problem is that like so much else, the colon does double duty. It's used to join an introduction with an explanation or definition:

(Explanation... "why")

You should know why I left the party: My former business partner, the one who embezzled, was holding court by the pool.

(Definition "what")

First, understand what sociopathy is: a personality disorder that causes the person to engage in antisocial behavior due to a lack of an awareness of morality.

But the colon can also signal that what follows will be a list:

(list of three or more)

My cousin has failed at marriage three times: with Mike the love-maker, with Joe the taker, and with Pete the faker.

The list can be bulleted or numbered also:

My completed legal coursework includes: 

• ·         Legal Research and Writing
• ·         Advanced Legal Research
• ·         Legal Ethics and Law Office Practice
• ·         Business Law  
• ·         Tort Law
• ·         Practice and Procedure in Litigation

Now the rule about capitalizing after a colon is conventionally that if what follows is a complete sentence, you capitalize the first letter after the colon. Why? Because the colon is sort of a super-powered period (end stop) then. It's separating two sentences:

You should know why I left the party.

My former business partner, the one who embezzled, was holding court by the pool.

But here we don't want to just be making two different sentences. We're connecting them to say that they go together, that (in this case), sentence B explains what we mean in sentence A:

You should know why I left the party: My former business partner, the one who embezzled, was holding court by the pool.

The capital letter at the start of the second sentence acknowledges that it's a sentence, while the colon acknowledges that the two sentences are meant to be read together.

When the second part after the colon isn't a full sentence, that capital letter would be distracting (indicating a full sentence when it's not), so we leave that lower-case, as with the definition sentence.

Bulleted and numbered lists, however, sometimes have capped first letters... for each item in the list. (No matter what you choose, the choice should be applied consistently for every item on the list.) This isn't really required, but often looks better. In the case above with the course list, those are all titles of courses, and so would probably be capitalized anyway. 

With your sentence, 

It's better than he thought: he can run all day now. 

I think the problem is "it's" as the subject. It's not informative enough to set up the "explanation," which is "He can run all day now."

That is, yes, the "He" should be capped after the colon, because what follows is the explanation (what's not as bad as he thought) and it's a full sentence. However, because "it's" is so uninformative, you're not really setting up the question in that first clause to be answered after the colon. Try this:

His condition is better than he thought: He can run all day now. 

or

His recovery has been better than he thought: He can run all day now. 

or

His leg is better than he thought: He can run all day now. 

or

His stamina is better than he thought: He can run all day now. 

So you were right-- colon is good, cap letter is good. However, your mind was telling you that something was missing or needed improvement... and that's the subject of the sentence. The first sentence or clause before a colon sets up what is to come, and so should probably be clearly informative.

What do you think? It's (as much as I use "it's" myself, as you can see!) always a good idea to check sentences with "it" and "this" and "that" as subject and see if a more precise term will sound better. The fact that I could come up with four plausible nouns there indicates that you might want to be more specific in what "it" is. :)

Good question! Punctuation has secret depths, huh?

Alicia

Sentences: Why a clause? Why a comma? Rules bend for meaning construction

I was writing along for one of the "real jobs" (that is, the ones that pay), and in a response to a submission, wrote a sentence structured like this, "As I said earlier, I grew up near Richmond, and recognized many of the monuments portrayed in the photographs."

Now we all know the rule. To distinguish between the two independent clauses in a compound sentence, we use a comma plus a conjunction (, and). But there aren't two independent clauses. There's a dependent clause: As I said earlier, appropriately followed by a comma. (No, I won't argue the alternative or go into the very few exceptions here. I read too many student papers where there's no distinction between the introductory element and the main clause. Trust me. The reader needs it, and it was only the AP's need to save ink for newspapers that made this at all arguable. If you have read a thousand student sentences like this where there are no commas to distinguish sentence elements you would agree that a comma is usually necessary in complex sentences.) 
There's a main clause, with the sentence subject and predicate:  I grew up near Richmond

And there is a second predicate with a direct object:  recognized many of the monuments portrayed in the photographs.

The need for the conjunction is clear as we're linking two predicates, and the second predicate (recognized) with the sentence subject (I). But the comma before the "and"-- what's that about? Why did I immediately put that in? Ordinarily I wouldn't. Ordinarily, with one subject and two predicate sentences, I would just use the conjunction. So why did I use the comma? (I could, of course, just have made a mistake, but I don't usually make that kind of mistake -- years of editorial work have trained me in punctuating, though it didn't beat the dash-addiction out of me.) When I do something like that, I go back and try to figure out why I did it. I trust my instinct, but question it too. (Hey! I just did it again-- comma before the conjunction before a second predicate! Why? I think because the second is a contradiction of the first, so I signify that with the comma-- "... here comes something different.")

Anyway, back to the original sentence. (And the point of this is to say that the rules are important because they're based on the logic of sentencing, and when you understand the logic, you can tell when this particular sentence needs a non-rule treatment because it's doing something that is outside that logic.)

The kicker here isn't actually the subject (I) or the double-predicate. It's that introductory element (As I said  earlier).  What exactly did I say earlier?

What I said earlier in the letter was (in response to the setting of the book) that I had grown up near Richmond. I was trying to establish commonality and also present the reality that I was perhaps more able to appreciate an aspect of the book (the photos) than another reader. 

But... what I didn't say earlier was this:
  recognized many of the monuments portrayed in the photographs.
That's new. I said "main clause with predicate 1" before, but not "trailing phrase with predicate 2" before. 

Without the comma, I would be saying that I'd said all that before, and the reader would be looking back to the first paragraph and wondering what had happened to the mention of the recognition.  

The comma says, "What's before me is separate in some meaningful way from what's after me." I don't have to necessarily specify what the difference in meaning is, but the comma is a recognition of that so that the reader doesn't have to wonder. We can trust the reader to sense if not completely consciously understand that there is a distinction between this:
As I said earlier, I grew up near Richmond and recognized many of the monuments portrayed in the photographs. (That is, I said all of this earlier.)
and this:
As I said earlier, I grew up near Richmond, and recognized many of the monuments portrayed in the photographs. (I said only the Richmond part earlier.)

Now I could also have done it the standard compound (two clause) way:
As I said earlier, I grew up near Richmond, and I recognized many of the monuments portrayed in the photographs. (That is, the trailing phrase is now a clause with its own subject.)

That would have been just fine, except three I's in one sentence might seem repetitive, not to mention egotistical. So precision of meaning gave way to reverse-vanity, I guess.

Point is, as usual-- Know the rule. Understand the underlying logic. Intuit exceptions. Second-guess your intuition. Make a conscious ruling. 
Do all that, and I'll even shut up about exceptions to the rule about commas and intro elements... but you have to add, "Explain your rationale" for that one. :)

Punctuation is part of the construction of meaning in a sentence and paragraph.

Alicia


 

Back to sentences

We're both still alive! Just distracted. Anyway, I came across a sentence construction that made me long to blog again. Here it is--

Josie, whose experience with the police department had given her a jaundiced view of City Hall, nodded agreement to her friend Bill's admiration about the mayor.

I know, too complex, too wordy, all that. That always happen when I try to riff on an actual sentence to disguise where I got it. (Sure, the Major Author I'm paraphrasing probably isn't following this blog, but once I discussed a poem I'd read -- fortunately not negatively-- and the poet popped up and commented... so I'm spooked. This internet thing sure ruins the secrecy of sniping.)

But what I want to talk about is how we can use sentence construction to amplify or clarify the meaning. The context on the page is that Josie need Bill's help but hasn't broached the subject yet. But the way the above sentence is constructed, with the "conflict" kind of encapsulated in the relative clause (whose experience). The conflict is the point of the sentence, to show that Josie is going against her own beliefs to agree.

One way I (and many readers) mentally distinguish sentence and sentence parts is "positive and negative," or as I actually think of it, "Plus 1 and minus 1."  Basically, is the message sent by this a yes or a no? For example:
Josie, whose experience with the police department had given her a jaundiced view of city government, 
That's negative, in that she is "jaundiced" (cynical) about this.

About this same thing (City Hall, that is, mayor?), Bill is "positive". And Josie is positive also suddenly:
nodded agreement to her friend Bill's admiration about the mayor.

The reader has to get the idea of the conflict, or she'll say, "Huh?" and go back and read to find out if she missed something ("Did I misunderstand what 'jaundiced' means? I'll go look it up").  Here, Josie's shift from negative to positive (about the same subject) in one sentence would usually indicate the need for a "conflict signal," that lets the reader know that the author knows that this is a conflict, that there's been a shift. (Hang on there-- I'm anticipating your objections, and I'll get to at least one, but this book didn't do what could have made this right. Anyway, I want to make this one point first. :)

Another issue is that the negative (her cynicism) is as important as her action-- the juxtaposition makes them both important. The point is  not that she's cynical or that she nods agreement, surely, but that she's cynical and yet she nods agreement. The juxtaposition can be more evident if one element isn't buried in a relative clause. That is, as you revise sentences, think about what the "weight" of each element is. Generally (there are exceptions, as when you want to trick the reader or be ironic), important things are in the main clause. (Putting important things in minor sentence elements can create subtext-- but "subtext" exists because we have "text" first-- we might have to know how to do things conventionally in order to do the unconventional really well, at least those of us who aren't naturally unconventional. :) (BTW, my husband just reminded me of the single greatest recognition I ever got in my whole life -- except the boys telling me that I was the best mother evuh, and I suspect a lot of other mothers got something similar in their Mother's Day cards-- was that at Blacksburg High School, senior year, I was voted "most non-conformist" in the class. You can tell what a repressed class we were, if I ended up being the wild one.)

By far the most common way to signal a conflict is to use the word "but". "But" usually introduces an independent clause, so I'd merge the relative clause with the subject and make that an independent clause, so we'll end up with two independent clauses of the same "weight," thus syntactically the same importance:

Josie's experience with the police department had given her a jaundiced view of City Hall, but she nodded agreement to her friend Bill's admiration about the mayor.

(Consider the different "feel" if we used "so" as the conjunction-- ironic? Grim?)

Now both parts of the sentence are of equal importance, and the juxtaposition (negative/positive) of both creates the joint sentence experience. It will cause the reader to pose the right question, which isn't "How does the dictionary define 'jaundiced'?" It's "What's her purpose in pretending to agree with him about the mayor?" Getting the reader -- with a single sentence-- to ask the right question helps create that "narrative propulsion" that keeps the reader reading (to find the answer).

Readers can be quite sensitive to nuance, and a sentence that doesn't create the experience you want them to have-- yes, a single sentence-- can throw them out of the fictive world. It's often hard to find those "clunker" sentences, but once you put on your reader hat and read like a reader and find them, they're usually easy to fix.

But... exception! Objections! As I said, the book I paraphrased this from didn't supply the context-- this was in fact the first sentence of a scene. But if there had been some context (like that she needed to stay on Bill's good side or get him to give her an introduction to the mayor) set up in the passage above, or the paragraph above, then the original sentence:
Josie, whose experience with the police department had given her a jaundiced view of City Hall, nodded agreement to her friend Bill's admiration about the mayor.

... would have been a lot more understandable (in the right way). It would have been like Josie Smiling Very Hard-- we would probably have understood quickly that this action of nodding was both against her own inclinations (revealed in the relative clause-- see, relegated to secondary "weight" because it is now less important) and in furtherance of the previously identified or intimated goal. If we had a bit of context, we'd know she's "not herself" because she's playing a part, not because the author screwed up the characterization. :)

Context is all, and we don't have to supply enormous buckets of it. But in the absence of context, our sentences should say what we mean, or rather, say what they need to say to give readers the experience we want them to have this very moment. In this case, it might be "asking the right question;" in another, it might be "understanding the context." 

We are the ones in control, and control of prose is based on the sentence level. Lots of writers are quite intuitive and don't need to second-guess themselves... but the rest of us might need to check to make sure we're creating the experience we want the reader to have-- at that very moment, and in accumulation of moments of the story.

Alicia 

That pop at the end

I've been avidly watching Game of Thrones on HBO, and as with most HBO productions, I've been impressed with the crisp, controlled writing. Word on the street was that the show followed the book pretty closely, so I didn't rush to buy the books, but I have them now and I'm about halfway through the first one. Based on this limited reading, I would agree that so far, the series is true to the books, but there are some minor changes. One of them, I think, bears examination. There are no spoilers here, so don't worry if you haven't seen the series to this point yet. The lines we'll look at came from about midway through season one, but they won't reveal much about plot or conflict.

The character Tyrion Lannister has had a run of bad luck, and finds himself in the woods with only one swordsman with him. This is hostile territory packed with warring tribes. Soon enough, some of the tribes people come upon Tyrion at his makeshift camp. Dialogue ensues, including these two lines.

From the book:
"How would you like to die, Tyrion son of Tywin?"
"In my own bed, with a belly full of wine and a maiden's mouth around my cock, at the age of eighty," he replied.

From the HBO episode:
Tribal guy
How would you like to die, Tyrion, son of Tywin?

Tyrion
In my own bed, at the age of 80, with a belly full of wine and a girl's mouth around my cock.

I won't embed the HBO clip here, but it can be readily found on youtube here, here, and probably other places, too, until takedown notices go out. The main thing I want to point out is how much the emphasis shifts when the phrase "at the age of eighty" is moved. Remember the general rule that what comes last carries more emphasis, and burying things in the middle will diminish their impact. And I want to point out -- this is important -- that either line is equally valid, depending on what you wish to emphasize.

I would say, then, that the book is more preoccupied with issues of life and death, and is more willing to diminish the sex and drinking that's so dominant in the series. Based on my reading so far, there's very little actual sex -- a few minor details, but nothing like what we see in the series. The series is pretty graphic in that respect. The book does pay more attention to the way people die and how it weighs on the minds of the living, so this particular arrangement -- sex and wine buried in the middle, the pop at the end from "age of eighty" -- makes sense for the book.

But the series is different. Not different in plot or character, but different in emphasis. There are naked women all over that set (Hey, HBO! Even it up and show us more naked men already! Fair's fair!) and Tyrion's wit seems much more evident because of the brilliant way the character is played. So they played this line for shock and laughs, and they diminished the life-and-death aspects by shifting focus to the sex-and-wine aspects. It's the right choice for the series, given the context.

How would it be different if they had shifted other bits around, too? What would that have told us about the emphasis of the story?

Theresa

Wanted to foreground this so Adrian would see and rescue me

Adrian (or anyone, but Adrian had the original suggestion), help me here.

 Remember:

She stayed, but her reply was reluctant. 

I want to use this sentence model in a class I'm teaching, to show the meaning change when something is 'diminished" or "demoted' from an independent ("but") clause to a dependent ("though") clause.

Can you think of a more active pairing than I have? like:

She (verb), but/though her (noun) was (adjective).
or--
She (verb), but/though she (verb).

Muddy brain here (hay fever halcyon).
Maybe "She walked out, but/though her withdrawal was temporary."

Hmm. Still quite static.

She choked, but/though her nausea was shortlived.

She vomited, but/though... no, let's not go there.

She resumed her seat, but/though her posture was tense.

Why am I so PASSIVE????

Help! Is it that the construction I'm looking for just doesn't call for much action?

Help!!!

Alicia

Simple Edit

Sometimes we come across a sentence structured like this:

There/It (subject)
was/were (verb)
someone/something (direct object)
who/which/that (relative pronoun)
did something (relative pronoun clause)

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.

It was a face that only a mother could love.

This creates a slight wordiness and relegates the impact ideas to a dependent structural position in the sentence. Fix it by killing the flat subject/verb, cutting the relative pronoun, and rearranging the remaining words into a simple sentence.

An old woman lived in a shoe.

Only a mother could love that face.

You see how that works? It's not all-purpose, but it will yield a stronger sentence in the majority of cases.

Theresa

Solving a Sentence

Some time ago, we looked at a tricky sentence -- evocative and beautiful, but not perfectly balanced -- and I asked for feedback from all of you on how you might edit it. Or if you would edit it. Here's the sentence again:

But it felt so good to be out in the open land, sunlight pouring on her head and arms, bees buzzing in the anemone, the scent of pine tickling her nostrils.

I have to start by saying, again, that this is a good, evocative sentence, but bits of it nag my eyes when I read it. In the original post, I broke the sentence down, or started to, anyway , which I think I ought to re-post here:

But it felt so good to be out in the open land,
(1) sunlight pouring on her head and arms,
(2) bees buzzing in the anemone,
(3) the scent of pine tickling her nostrils.

If you've been reading this blog for any stretch of time, it probably won't surprise to you learn that my eye first snagged on the present participial phrases. (If you aren't familiar with our long rants against PPPs, I'll just suggest you read this post and this post. And maybe this one, which is long but excellent.) Whenever I see a PPP, my eye immediately searches out the sentence for the noun modified by the PPP. In this case, pouring modified sunlight, buzzing modifies bees, ticking modifies scent. So that's all fine.

But something about that sentence still made me pause, so I went to the next check. What did that list of three modify? Open land. And the series lines up in neat order after open land, so that seemed to work just fine.

And yet, I wasn't satisfied. So, if we can see that everything is in the proper order, the next check has us look at the relationships between the parts. And this is where I started to dither, and it's also where I get to touch on another old rant. You see, all those little words that we think of as mostly invisible -- the conjunctions, the relative pronouns, the prepositions, and the like -- are crucial for creating relationships between the "idea" words in a sentence. We could have a list of idea words:

sports car, zoomed, grocery store

And not know the relationship between the parts. There's a world of difference between,

The sports car zoomed to the grocery store.

and

The sports car zoomed through the grocery store.

Right? Changing one word, one tiny little preposition, changes the entire meaning of that sentence because it changes the relationship between the parts. When we skip those relationship words (as when we substitute a semicolon for a conjunction), we might still be getting the right words down, but we sacrifice our ability to control the reader's interpretation of the relationship between the parts.

Sometimes the ambiguity is exactly what we want, as in Alicia's favorite semicolon from Auden:

I thought love would last forever; I was wrong.

He could have said,

I thought love would last forever, AND I was wrong.

Or,

I thought love would last forever, BUT I was wrong.

Either of those would signal a slightly different shade of meaning, but in this case, the semicolon creates an ambiguity that works strongly for the sentence -- because it could be BUT, it could be AND, or it could even be both or neither. The nature of the relationship between those clauses is ambiguous for a purpose, and the ambiguity actually adds meaning to the poem.

But that's another issue, and frankly, it's a rare semicolon that adds more than it detracts. And this sample sentence is not about semicolons, but about the way we glue pieces together with tiny words. And in this case, I think we need some glue. It's not technically necessary, but it would add clarity and precision. Maybe something like,

But it felt so good to be out in the open land with sunlight pouring on her head and arms, bees buzzing in the anemone, and the scent of pine tickling her nostrils.

Adding two words -- the preposition with and the conjunction and -- converts that series into a prepositional phrase with a compound object. Note, too, that now we can get rid of the comma after land, which was previously used to signal the ellipsis. (Ellipsis = missing word = the preposition with)

Or maybe we want to make it adverbial.

But it felt so good to be out in the open land when the sunlight poured on her head and arms, bees buzzed in the anemone, and the scent of pine tickled her nostrils.

Now we have a compound adverbial clause, and notice that we can again eliminate the comma after land. We also can shift the form of the verbs in the clauses to past participles, which always read a little more easily. Of course, now the clause signals something different about the nature of the relationship between the main clause and the dependent clause. Where before we had a preposition indicating something about the nature of the land, now we have a temporal adverb indicating something about the moment in time spent on the land. It's a different relationship between the parts.

There might be other ways to solve that sentence, too, and shore up the relationship between the parts. Or it might be that the author will choose to leave the relationship ambiguous. Worked for Auden, right? In any case, it's a good sentence, and it's a good example of how to tinker with pieces using those little relationship words.

Theresa

Quick Answer to a Quick Question

Anon in the comments asks,

Where do you come down on the whole "as though..." was/were thing? As though she were the adult here, as though she was the adult. If I were sick, if I was sick. I see was a lot in books--is that acceptable?

This is a species of the conditional, and it creates a lot of confusion because colloquial English and standard English have two different rules. So this gives us a good opportunity to discuss the difference between the two different grammar standards, and how fiction writers should handle them.

First, the standard rule can be a little complicated, but your example is the conditional expressed in the subjunctive. So, the ordinary way of structuring a conditional sentence is in two parts:

If condition, then result.


"If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you some art (a Picasso or a Garfunkel)."


That line is from the Barenaked Ladies hit from a few years back, "If I Had a Million Dollars,"  a/k/a Exhibit A in the long list of evidence proving that the conditional is alive and well in the English language. Bet you can all think of other examples, once you think about it. Look for the word "if" -- If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning.

If the asserted condition in the first part of the sentence is contrary to fact, then we have to play some games with the verb tenses to signal the untruthful or hypothetical nature of the statement. Compare:

If I had enough cash, I would buy dinner.
to
If I have enough cash, I am buying (or will buy) dinner.

You know almost intuitively that in the second statement, the speaker might actually pick up the tab, but in the first, it's just not going to happen. Right? And the clues are in the verb tenses. If the main clause (the result) includes would/could/will/might or similar tentative conjugations, and if the dependent clause (the condition) is stepped back in time from the present moment of the sentence, then we know we're dealing with something contrary to fact.

There are some little hitches in the rule. For example, if the verb in the condition is "to be," the past conjugation is always "were" regardless of person or number.
If I were a millionaire
If we were millionaires
If she were a millionare
And so on, in every permutation of the verb in this tense.

English speakers tend to ignore this in colloquial speech, unless they're educated people or writers or other disreputable types. *cough*  So in common everyday usage, it wouldn't be startling to hear someone say,
If I was a millionaire, I would buy dinner.
And everyone at the table would know who's not picking up the tab, right?

So what's a fiction writer to do? It's kind of a case-by-case matter. If you're writing the interior monologue or dialogue of a person likely to use the colloquial expression, then it's safe to use the colloquial variant there. If your protagonist is a lawyer or English teacher, or if your prose style tends away from the colloquial for other reasons, probably not so much.

And this could be said of many common colloquialisms, such as "probably not so much" in the previous sentence. That's not correct formal English, but it's acceptable colloquial English. Fictive grammar is always something of a blend of grammar rules, part formal grammar, part wild English. How you blend them is part of your voice, but that doesn't mean you get to do it blindly. Do it deliberately, with grace and control and clarity, to achieve an effect.

Does that answer your question? It's not cut and dried, I know, so if you have questions, please do ask.

Theresa

Minor fix

Creating fake summary paper introductions for a class, and came across a "need to fix" sentence, or rather I wrote it.

The "On the Road" gallery displays in a glass case part of the 120-foot long paper scroll Kerouac used to type his story, and includes the old Olivetti typewriter he used to type it.

Okay, too much used to type! Quick fix to eliminate some of the redundancy:

The "On the Road" gallery displays in a glass case part of the 120-foot long paper scroll Kerouac used to type his story, and includes his old Olivetti typewriter.

Now generally I like to put the longest element in a list last, so I might revise to:

The "On the Road" gallery displays in a glass case Kerouac's old Olivetti typewriter and part of the 120-foot long paper scroll he used for the story.

Just another in a long series of fascinating glimpses into my motley career.

Oh, notice that whatever comes first, that's when I have "Kerouac's," and I have "his" second. That is, I identify the name and then replace it with the pronoun. I really wanted to end "scroll he typed the story on..." but you know that blamed preposition. I must fiddle some more.

Will even one student appreciate my obsessiveness? Probably not. I also don't like "displays in a glass case," but I need to get the glass case in there because, see, in this imaginary paper I'm not going to write (I'm just teaching introductions here), there's a whole section on the glass case. I must stay true to the imaginary paper!

I don't, however, have to put all this into one sentence. Must remember that. Pixels on the screen: Not so expensive as diamonds. Can waste them.
Alicia

Questions on the Case of Pronouns

My simple trick for handling pronoun cases in compounds led to a couple of questions. I am nowhere near my shelf full of reference books, so this is off the top of my head. Anyone with other opinions or approaches is welcome to speak up in the comments.

Jami asks,

I'll tell you the one that always trips me up. "It is he/she/I/they." I'm not sure what that form is called. I used to know it, but then it promptly fell out of my head.

An easy explanation for that type of construction? Why should it be 'Woe is I' and not 'Woe is me'?

It's not, "Woe is I." The correct usage would be, "Woe is me."

Here's why. Nominative pronouns (I/he/she/they) are the ones that are used as subjects.
I am
he is
she is
it is
they are

Objective pronouns (me/him/her/them) are the ones that are used as objects. (Get it? Objective = objects.) For example, objects of prepositions:
for me
for him
for her
for them

But also as direct objects.
He loves me.
He loves her.
He loves him.
He loves them.

So far, so good? We do most of this intuitively without ever pondering pronoun cases.

"Woe is me" and similar constructions can generate a little confusion because of an old-fashioned sentence structure, little used today, in which the sentence order is reversed. Instead of SVO, it would be OVS:
I am woe
becomes
Woe am I.

Other predicate material continues to follow the reversed OVS:
Grieved am I to learn of your misfortunes.
Happy are they who dwell in the house of the Lord.

How do you know if it's SVO or OVS? Check the verb.

I am woe/ Woe am I.
Woe is me.

When woe is the subject, it takes the third person singular conjugation of the verb of being.


Thomas raises a similar question:

She was born about the same time as me...

Or should that be ...the same time as I?

You thought we were getting all academicky and jargonish with our objective and nominative pronouns? Heh. Here we go now. That right there is what we might call an elliptical adverbial complex sentence.

The adverb "as" is a big troublemaker. For some years now, there's been a rumor going around writerland that we should all cut the word "as" from our sentences. I'm convinced that rumor was started by some poor copy editor who was tired of pulling her hair out over this frequently botched adverb and declared a moratorium on its use. She has my sincere sympathy.

You've used it correctly here to describe a time of an occurrence. So we're good so far. To understand this, let's start by restoring the ellipsis.

She was born about the same time as I (was born).

Now that we have the verb in place, we can see that we need the nominative pronoun. We wouldn't say,

She was born about the same time as me (was born).

The confusion on this probably stems from like/as confusion -- the very same confusion that led some frustrated, bald copy editor to issue her injunction.

Like is a preposition which takes an object, meaning that the pronoun would be in the objective case.

Like me, she was born at City Hospital.

Not,

Like I, she was born at City Hospital.

You know I have a cheater's trick for this, too, right? If you don't know whether to use like or as, try substituting when and see what happens.

She was born about the same time when I was born.

Makes a heck of a lot more sense than,

When I, she was born at City Hospital.

It's not a perfect trick, but it will work most of the time.

Theresa

Time and sentences

Here's an interesting article about steampunk--

One of the little things we edit for is time sequence in sentences. Usually (not always, but remember that we want to establish the convention so the unconventional can stand out and be important), you want the sentence and the action to proceed in the same direction, so the reader doesn't have to puzzle out what happened first. The order of the sentence should make that clear.

Again, there are times where you want to dislocate the reader and make her stop and puzzle out what you mean. However, you don't want that when you don't want that. Don't puzzle the reader when you really just want the reader to read on and accumulate what's happening and make sense of it without stopping.

So notice that when you have:
Before he caught Rover, he put on his running shoes after taking off his loafers. Then he chased the dog down the street.
...you're likely to get a "huh?" from the reader, and a momentary rejiggering of events:
"Oh. Okay. First he took off his loafers. Then he put on his running shoes. Then he chased the dog down the street. THEN he caught Rover. Got it."
Now notice, all those events really happened, and they happened in a sequence (just not the one in the sentence :).

I'm thinking that you might want to have a breach in sequence when the connection is causal:
Before he stepped into the street, he looked both ways.
That is, presumably the first event is that he realizes he's about to step into the street, SO he looks both ways. So we might want to have the cause (the imminence of stepping) before the effect (looking both ways).

Also, all intent is not to be fulfilled. "Before" implies a potentiality, and that means something might not happen. And in that case, the "before" which never happens will work at the beginning:
Before she could stop him, he'd run into the street.

But, again, the subtleties of sentence are preserved when you reserve them for when you actually want that meaning. So I try not to mess with sequence unless I mean it.

Here's a sentence similar one I recently edited. (Don't count on the editor to catch and fix these. Make your sentences mean what you want to mean.)
She went into the kitchen and started cooking but only after he first stopped her to tell her about all his many food allergies.
Unless there's a reason not to, assemble the sentence elements chronologically.
Alicia

Sentence simplification

Here's another thrilling editing experience (we editors do have exciting jobs!):

"I mostly make dinner at home. I'm not that great a chef," she said, "but at least no one has to tip me."

I made up the sentence, but it's modeled on one I came across in editing.

Now I probably wouldn't edit this in someone else's copy, but I would in my own story. I want sentences that are clear and decisive. And the "no one" clumsily adds another "character" to the line. There's "I" the cook, and presumably "no one" is a reference to the family who is eating that mediocre meal. But the family isn't in there. Not a big deal, but if I'm going for clarity (that is, any ambiguity is intentional, not accidental), the subjects and verbs should match up and the pronouns especially (and "no one" is sort of a pronoun here) should have an antecedent earlier in the paragraph.

How would I fix this? I'd probably make the whole sentence about "I"--

"I mostly make dinner at home. I'm not that great a chef," she said, "but at least I don't expect a tip."

That way, the sentence is unified-- it's all about "I", and there isn't the introduction of someone (okay, "no one") else in the second clause.

Just a minor point. But sentence-consciousness is a valuable approach to self-editing. What does your sentence SAY? And what might trip readers up, if only momentarily?
Alicia

Another IT factor -- "As It"

Here's another way the word it cues weakness in a sentence. You know how writers are sometimes advised to eliminate the word as? Usually, we're talking about problems of simultaneity, but not always. Sometimes, it's just plain old wordiness.

Watch for the word combo, as it.

She listened to the roar of the crowd as it erupted from the sports stadium.

You can kill as it and get a stronger sentence.

She listened to the roar of the crowd erupt from the sports stadium.

It's still wordy, but it's better, and this is a very easy fix to spot and to make.

Theresa

Sequence with "like"

Just came across a minor edit and thought I'd pass it on. Again, it's all about sequence. I'm beginning to think everything is about sequence. Anyway, here's the original sentence or the opening clause, anyway:

You are not a sports fan, like me.....

Now is "me" a sports fan or not? It's not clear, is it?

But proper placement of that "like me" will make the meaning clear.

First, "like me" here is a prepositional phrase, which, like participial phrases, can be moved around to all sorts of places in the sentence. Both prepositional phrases and participial phrases are usually (not always) adjectival, modifying a noun, so they "sound" right next to almost any noun. But they actually only correctly modify one noun in the sentence, and for clarity, that's where you should place the modifying phrase.

Here, what is "like me"? YOU are, right? At least that's what the further context (in the rest of the paragraph) suggests-- you are like me in that you are not a sports fan.

So:
You are, like me, not a sports fan....

Do you like that better than--

You, like me, are not a sports fan....

See the distinction there (not in meaning as syntax, I think-- they both mean you and I aren't sports fans). "If you are, like me" has the modifying phrase after the predicate, and so in a way it modifies not a single word but the whole clause there. That isn't wrong, exactly, and in fact, we do it all the time with adverbs: In "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," the whole admission is "frank", not just the very-- I don't give frankly.

But I think in this case, we are setting up a comparison between you and me, two people, two pronouns, and so the prepositional phrase might be best right after the "you." Then what follows "like me" is the aspect we share, the way in which you are like me. So I am going with:

You, like me, are not a sports fan....

And in that case "like me" is clearly interruptive and so set off with commas, and we can avoid the conundrum of whether "like me" in the alternative should be set off. Let me show you the options:
You are, like me, not a sports fan.... (that is, the clause is, "You are not a sports fan" and the "like me" is an interruptive -- appositive-- as above.)
versus
You are like me, not a sports fan.... (here the clause is "You are like me" and the "like me" is actually a predicate adjective-- what are you? Like me.)
I think that probably this will depend on which aspect you are going to emphasize or develop. If you're going to talk more about how you and I are alike, go with "you, like me". If you want to talk more about "you", I guess go with "you are, like me, not a sports fan...."

Then again, there's:

Like me, you are not a sports fan....

That also clearly has the "like me" modifying "you," as they're adjacent.

Oh, and what if "me" really is a sports fan? I think then I'd make that clear not like this:
You are not a sports fan, like me.....

"Me" is an object, and "like" then becomes a conjunction. (Don't ask-- I could explain but I'm tired." A conjunction conjoins clauses, and "like" shouldn't be a conjunction (I mean, that's a misuse)-- the correct conjunction for similarity is "as". So that should be:
You are not a sports fan, as I am.

That way "I" goes with the positive (I am) not the negative (are not).

Ugly sentence, isn't it? Well, the way to fix that isn't to make it unclear and/or ungrammatical, but to rewrite it to reflect what you're emphasizing-- you or me? "I am a sports fan. I make no apologies for that. But you, sir, are not a sports fan, and so you can spend your Sundays on more productive activities."
Or--
"You are not a sports fan. That's all right, even though I am. I paint my face blue every Sunday the Colts are playing, and go into a depression every time they lose. (Not that they've been losing at all this season.)"

You don't have to put it all in one sentence. In fact, when you open the thought up, you might create something more fun than that single sentence summary.

Again, know what you mean, and make the sentence(s) say that. Don't make the reader guess.

Alicia

More sentences

Now all I'm doing here is presenting sentence sequences and constructions that I think might send the reader off in the wrong direction or make her squint and backtrack, or break your POV logic. This is just to keep conscious in revision of what the reader is going to get, and make sure it's what you want.

Here's one of those dialogue passages that doesn't use "he said," and the lack of that tends to draw readers in more to the dialogue. However, the reader still does need to be sure of who is saying what.

Example, and I am making the characters "he" and "she" so there's no pronoun confusion:

They stopped outside of a massive block of storage containers, and both of them got out of the truck. Oliver glanced over at the office, where a young guard sat bored behind the alarmed windows. It would do.

"I owe you one." Mary handed him the envelope. He stuffed it in his pocket. "I'll use the combination from high school-- you remember that."

"Kurt Cobain's deathday. Yeah. I remember."

"I owe you one" is spoken by Oliver, but as it's immediately followed by "Mary handed him" it sort of sounds like Mary said it. So how about "Oliver took the envelope"? That way his name is the one closest to the dialogue sentence and, also, it's clearly in his POV (you can say "he" if you don't like using the POV character's name)-- he's the one whose actions (taking rather than giving) matter, as we're in his perspective.

Not a big deal. But stay conscious of the reader's experience of your sentences, and know that you can cause the right experience by how you craft the sentences. The last thing you want is to halt your careful pacing by making the reader go back and re-read.

Alicia

Sequence in sentence order

I don't think there's a RIGHT answer to this, but I keep coming across this issue with submissions and usually deciding how to edit based on context and other stuff. But I wonder how you all deal with it, what logic you use.

That is, how do you sequence when you have different types of sentences? Arrgh. I can't find the words. Let's say there are different types of info you can put in this passage or paragraph:

His perception.
Something that happens that causes that perception. (That is, the approaching car turned on his brights.)
The physical reaction to the event (flinching, say).
Emotional reaction to the event.
Thought or conclusion.
His action in response to event (not the immediate flinching, but the flashing his own lights or putting down the visor).

The two that seem the most movable are those first two, the event and the perception of the event. Which comes first? And what does POV have to do with it?

For example, with a deeper POV, his perception is all we get of the event, right? I mean, it's not objectively the car is approaching and the brights come on. Rather he sees the car approaching and the brights on. The perception statement is how we know what is happening.

But what about in a more objective narration, where there is a distinction between what actually happens and what is perceived? Maybe the event is really the big important thing:

And then the space ship imploded, and space debris rushed into the hole where The Pacifica used to be.
Well, that's maybe separate from:
Junie Warren chewed her peanut butter sandwich while watching the news on TV.
Which then would you lead with? Does it depend on whether Junie or the space ship is your focus?

What about when it's all pretty personal and there's a cause/effect:

I panted like a plowhorse.
I climbed the four storeys to my apartment. (If ever we needed an intro participial phrase... but which verb to participlize? Panting, or climbing? Which goes first, the cause (climbing) or the effect?)
So--
Panting like a plowhorse, I climbed the four storeys to my apartment. (Hmm. Do you pant WHILE/simultaneous to climbing? Do we want to show that?)
or
Climbing the four storeys to my apartment, I panted like a plowhorse.

Or would you think there's a cause and effect here and do it in two sequential clauses, but reversed to show cause then effect:

After I climbed the four storeys to my apartment, I was (past progressive... why?) panting like a plowhorse.

I climbed the four storeys to my apartment, and by the time I reached the top, I was panting like a plowhorse.

Here's a sentence I just came across:

He stopped walking, his attention caught by a ruckus at the entrance.

Just a workman sentence, nothing special. So I'm not saying it can or should be brilliant. But notice this might have something to do with how deep the POV is.

This presumably is the sequence of events from inside him (in his POV):
He's walking.
He sees the ruckus.
It catches his attention.
He stops walking.

But let's be outside, omniscienty, more distant-- observing him rather than being him. What's the sequence from outside him?
He's walking.
He stops walking.
Why? The stop-walking means something has caught his attention.
He is looking at the entrance.
There is a ruckus there.

That is, from the outside, his action is before the perception. But from the inside, his perception is before the action.

Let's have some examples? What determines what sequence you have put a passage or sentence in?
Alicia

Minor editing thing

I just came across this in revising, and thought it was a good example of avoiding a problem. Here it is:
Original:

She handed him the snowcone and left him to return to the ballgame.

Minor, minor, minor! But who returned to the ballgame? Did she leave him (allow him, let go of him so he could go to the ballgame), or did she LEAVE him behind (go back to the ballgame herself)?

It's just one of those constructions that confuses, and shouldn't. So I just edited out the "him" which caused the confusion, and voila! It works, and it's clear that she's the one who went back to the ballgame:
She handed him the snowcone and left to return to the ballgame.

This is the sort of dangerous decision editors have to make. I mean, it's not all fun and games, doing a line edit.

But there is a teachable point here (there always is). Writers should be conscious of the misconceptions caused by sentence construction. Stay in contact with your own meaning there, and make sure that the sentence says that and only that. (Ambiguity is great, but not about which character went back to the ballgame. Be ambiguous about emotion, about theme, about values... but not about character motion.:)

I'm wondering if-- this is such a trivial sentence. But I'm wondering if we make the action slightly different...
She grabbed the snowcone from him and left him to return to the ballgame.

Hmm. No, it's still not clear who went back to the ballgame.

Read consciously, and revise to refine meaning. And it's ALL important. Every sentence. Well, really, it is. Every unintentionally ambiguous sentence detracts from the deliberate ambiguity of more important sentences. Your reader needs to trust you-- needs to believe that THIS ambiguity means something and isn't just an accident.
Alicia

More on Gemma's dark moment

Why is this a "dark" moment? I think it's illustrative to see how this is set up.

Gemma is TOUGH. And she loves her men, and above all doesn't want to cause them harm. (And she knows they're dangerous when they're riled. :)

She doesn't "whine". She doesn't seek support. She doesn't ask for help. She is always in charge. That's her value system. Telling about this is against her own personal code. It's weak.

That's set up ahead of time. So when she is moved to tell this secret, to reveal her vulnerability and what she thinks of as her shame (she knows it's not her fault, but she thinks she was stupid and weak to let it happen), it's a very difficult choice because it goes against what she believes she "ought" to do. She ought to be able to handle this. And she sort of can (her sexuality is profoundly affected by the secrecy, and her relationship with Clay, so it's not unmixed-- and shouldn't be). Her decision to tell is made from love -- trying to reconcile Clay and Jax.

Clay, btw, has a similar journey. We of course think the husband of a rape survivor should act with love and compassion and never scorn her (and we're right). But by his code, or the club's code, which Gemma knows and actually supports, he should reject her now. That is, it's HIS value system, not ours, that makes this "dark", makes this a difficult choice for him. (He too acts with love, fortunately, but the writers quite rightly make this take a bit of time.)

But it's OUR value system (he should act with love) that determines, I think, that this is the right decision, even if it's the 'wrong' one by his own pre-existing value system.

Brilliantly done. But this is important-- we have to set this up. The action has to be painful, difficult, "dark" for this to be a dark moment. What in the run-up, in the whole story and character development BEFORE the dark moment makes this dark for your character?

BTW, there's a very nice setup moment for Jax in this episode. His friend, speaking of Clay, says, "He's your father." (Clay has, apparently, been his stepfather for 20 years, and they do love each other.) Jax says coldly, "My father died on Hwy 580." (His real father.) That is, Jax disavows this relationship (he has good reason, also set up). And so his action in the end of the episode, where he puts his hand on Clay's shoulder, and stays there as Clay covers his hand and holds it, is that much more intense, as it's re-establishing his filial bond.

Alicia

That is an impertinence up with which I shall not put

I'm going to be pedantic again. Detail-oriented. Be warned. Stop reading if you think, "Only the plot matters!" This isn't about plot. This is about an issue we face often in editing, and you don't have to think this is important. But you know, editors are the ones who should think this kind of thing is important. Someone has to care. Sniffle.

Some usage rules come out of a distant past when Latin grammar was presumed to be the standard, and one of those is "never split an infinitive," easy enough to obey in Latin (infinitives are one word), but not so easy in English, with its two-word infinitives. Anyway, William Shatner did what William Shakespeare feared to do, boldly splitting an infinitive on national TV ("To boldly go where no man has gone before," vs. "To be or not to be," see).

And I am not going against Captain Kirk!

But actually, I want to talk about prepositions. Another old rule is that you aren't supposed to end a sentence on a preposition. (I don't know if this is based on Latin-- do you know Latin was the ONLY class I ever failed? Really. I did get a D-- a total gift-- in Matter, Energy, and Organization, and you'll know why when I tell you I don't even know what that title means.) This rule engendered Churchill's inimitably lofty comment: "That is an impertinence up with which I shall not put." But you know, it's not a bad rule completely. That is, sometimes a sentence-ending prep is fine, and sometimes it's a signal that your thought is incomplete.

(What's a preposition? It's one of those usually little words that describe some connection-- usually time or space-- between two things. These are not always logical-- I notice that a whole generation logically says "on accident"-- why not, when there's "on purpose"? And in NYC, they stand "on line" where most everywhere else, we stand "in line". This is the hardest thing for non-native speakers to get, even harder than articles. After all, a native speaker would probably never use the wrong article -- a for an, maybe, but that's more a dialect thing. But even the most adept native speaker occasionally messes up on a preposition, and they can differ by region too. Anyway, there are lots of prepositions, and most of the constructions that use them are not too complex. In fact, they'd be utterly ignored if we weren't all concerned about That Rule.)

The first exception is the "verb+"-- many English verbs take a preposition. Usually the preposition is the distinguishing factor: Look up, look down, look over, look away-- those are all different actions, and so really, though the base verb is "look," each compound term means something different because of the preposition. The preposition word is being used as an adverb, modifying the verb. Part of the eternal growability of English is that many verbs can be mutated by adding a preposition as a modifier. It's okay (though not always strong) to end a sentence on one of these compound predicates:
She looked up.

It's really ending on the verb, right?

Now I recently came across a great example of a preposition-ended sentence. It's from the song with the beautiful melody but ugly name-- Big Log by Robert Plant.

My love is in league with the freeway
Its passion will ride, as the cities fly by

"Fly by" is one of those compound predicates-- "fly by" or "fly away" or "fly over"-- they're all diffferent. "Fly by" is particular evocative in this song, as it's exactly what happens on a freeway-- the cities fly by-- or rather, we do, in the cars. This is, btw, a terrific example of an extended metaphor (love is like a freeway, being in love is like being on the run), with wonderful uses of "car" motifs like the rearview mirror:

Eyes in the mirror, still expecting they'll come
Sensing too well, when the journey is done
There is no turning back, no. There is no turning back, on the run.

Extended metaphors are probably more effective in poetry and in song than in fiction, but boy, would it impress me to see as graceful a metaphor as this in prose.

Also there's a later line that never gets transcribed right ("should I rest for awhile on the side" or "should I rest for awhile and decide" are the common transcriptions, but listen)--

My love is exceeding the limit,
Red-eyed and fevered with the hum of the miles
Distance and longing, my thoughts do collide
Should I rest for awhile beside?

Probably there's an elliptical "you" or some other object of that preposition (beside the road?), but leaving it elliptical not only completes the rhyme, but also focuses the attention on the singer's question here-- should he rest? And it's much sexier too-- resting beside. And remember that the last word in a sentence is a power position, and so ending on "beside" can make that position powerful. (I suspect that getting rid of the object there, the "you" or "the road," makes "beside" an adverb, answering the "where" question... funny how a word can change role that way!)

Anyway, lovely song, lovely metaphor, such control in the writing!

So back to prepositions. Here's a BAD preposition-end, and here's where I say take this as a clue that something is missing (paraphrased, but same preposition):
The mutineers were made an example of.

What's wrong? Well, it's a passive sentence-- "the mutineers" is supposed to be the object of that preposition, but it's in the subject position. The passive construction means that the sentence has to end on "of" because the object is being used elsewhere. The problem usually with the passive construction is that it lets the true actor (who ever did the making of example) off the hook. There are reasons to do that (if you don't know the true actor-- "She was murdered at 1 am"-- or the true actor isn't important-- "She was buried Tuesday at Forest Hills Cemetery"), but usually the actor of the action belongs in the subject position, and if you do that, you probably won't have that orphaned preposition:
The Navy made an example of the mutineers.

That is, the prep-ending is a clue that the thought is incomplete. In fact, I would probably add the "how"-- how did the Navy make an example of the mutineers? (unless I wanted to be mysterious).

Point is, the rule is only a suggestion, okay? It's based in real logic-- generally, a preposition is followed by an object, so look and see if you've misplaced or ignored the object. But because there are allowances for exceptions, you have more flexibility here-- you can see what meaning each possibility creates. And of course, violating a rule is always subversively exciting, and stop laughing. Okay, it's not as subversive as shooting heroin or swimming nude, but for a writer, it's pretty thrilling.

So think of it this way-- the more rules you understand, the more you can violate. :)

Alicia

Leading and Trailing Modifiers

Someone asked if we're as skeptical of trailing participial phrases (those after the main clause) as leading ones (those before the main clause). Good question. The main answer is-- I'm skeptical of almost any modifier (participial or no) before the main clause. That doesn't mean I think they're all bad, because they're not-- often we need some essential bit of information (time or place, say) to get the full impact of the sentence. Additionally (just like that, in fact:), a transition (like "additionally," I mean) can serve to link this sentence with previous ones, smoothing the bump there to the new thought.

And sometimes what are called "phatic phrases" (relatively meaningless turns of speech) can add the necessary few beats for cadence, or make a polite deferral ("Needless to say"), or invite some ritualistic bonding ("As we all know").

That is, leading modifiers can have functions beyond actually modifying the subject (or the whole sentence, as many of them do). And of course, some of them legitimately modify the subject and fit well there, letting the reader know something needed to be known before she gets to the main clause.

However (another transition :), placement of modifiers ends up being more important at the beginning of the sentence. For reasons I'm not clear on, usually intro modifiers are "bound" in some way to the immediately following words. Well, you know, if you think about how readers figure out what a sentence is saying, they are accumulating meaning as they read, and in the beginning of the sentence, they need everything to go together in order to get the right meaning. So it is more important to have the modifiers modify the nearby words when those first six words are all there are so far. Bound modifiers are usually "restrictive," required for the meaning of the sentence because they restrict the modified word in some important way. ("The woman who had been waiting for him"-- the subject is not any woman, but the one who had been waiting for him.) So it's important if you have a modifier that restricts the modified word to keep those close together so they are read and understood together.

By the end of the main clause, the readers have a lot more context and perhaps don't need as much connection. (This is why, btw, dependent clauses at the -start- of a sentence are followed by a comma, but when they're at the end of a sentence, they're usually not preceded by a comma-- Because I failed algebra, I couldn't take calculus vs. I couldn't take calculus because I failed algebra.)

Modifiers after the main clause are more likely to be considered "free," and they aren't likely to annoy as much if they don't modify the nearest noun or if they're adverbial and modify the predicate instead of (as many adverbs do at the start) the whole sentence.

Now I'm kind of coming at this backwards. The issue is not actually whether a particular modifier goes at the beginning or end. The issue is that the start of the sentence is an important position, and that's why the reader is going to interpret what comes at the start as important. And if you start with something inessential, something that is "free" and unrestrictive and could go elsewhere in the sentence, you might be wasting that valuable real estate, that chance to set context or focus the reader's attention. Many of the modifiers that get edited out seem to have one reason for being at the start of the sentence, and that's not "context-setting" or "transition-making" or anything that helps create meaning for the reader. The reason often seems to be "varying the opening construction", and that is seldom sufficient reason to "bind" a modifier that might be better elsewhere.

What to do if you have four sentences beginning with "he"? First, determine if that's truly a problem here (sometimes it's good for rhythm or emphasis or alliteration or balance to start a group of sentences the same way). If it is-- if the repetition is annoying or distracting-- think about using what might be essential introductory material, like a time-marker (In 1816,) or a transition (However,) or a necessary bit of information about this subject (The president of Switzerland,) or what they used to call a "sentence modifier," a word (usually just a word-- not sure why) that is meant to affect the whole sentence (like "Frankly," or "Regardless,"). That is, find something introductory that adds to the meaning of the sentence, that starts the meaning, in some essential way. (Sometimes, yes, this can be a participial phrase-- just not all that often. Why? I think probably it's because a participle is supposed to be an action, and if it's an important action, it might be better in the main clause, and if it's not that important, it shouldn't be starting the sentence.)

Notice that most of these important introductory things are short-- a few words or less. (Intro dependent clauses, especially "If" clauses, tend to be longer, and often I end up making them independent clauses, or transferring the conditional-- if-- to the second position. But dependent clauses-- because they're clauses with their own subject and predicate-- can be longer even at the beginning... easier to understand and accumulate the meaning when there's a subject/verb.) Shorter intros will "hide" the repetitive opening ("he"), while offering some essential piece of information ("In 1816") without burying the lede (main clause) too deep.

Okay, that was as clear as mud. But do be thinking of the start of the sentence as a place where you want something important, even essential, to the understanding of what is to come. This usually just isn't a good place for a mere place-holder, though paradoxically it's often a good place for that "phatic" phrasing. So much of "polite speech" (which phatic speech usually is) is meant to beat around the bush, to blunt the sharp point of the sentence, and in that case, burying the lede (there I go with the mixed metaphors again) is actually sort of the point. Needless to say, in point of fact, as we all know :), in that case, go ahead, put soothing filler at the start of the sentence-- just don't dull the point so much the reader doesn't get it.
Alicia

Alicia