Go Simple

On the morning of February 14, 2016, I opened The Washington Post and glanced at a headline about Justice Scalia being a leading conservative and decided this was an article about the Supreme Court’s latest decision. Ho-hum. Not until I opened my New York Times did I learn that Justice Scalia had died. The Times headline left no doubt: JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA IS DEAD AT 79. A simple declarative sentence, how powerful and direct: a subject, the present tense of the verb to be, and a simple prepositional phrase. The only way to make this declaration simpler would be to omit the prepositional phrase.

Why do so many writers steer clear of simple sentences? As my students know, I love them. No, I wouldn’t want prose made up only of simple sentences, but when something important needs to be written—a simple sentence leaves no room for misunderstanding.

Consider famous simple sentences from fiction: “I was born.” Ha, I admire Dickens for that one. Or “I steal” from Mona Simpson’s lovely short story, “Lawns.” Hemmingway is wordier with: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone 84 days now without catching a fish.” Okay, so this isn’t a simple sentence, yet it gets to the the heart of the problem that drives the narrative. May my writing do likewise.