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telephone continues, so Clocksin and Mellish could easily have continued to
use the second person. But with “we,” they insert themselves into the paragraph,
and so “we” search for the telephone together and, in the nal sentences, “we”
write down our steps in order so that “we” can see what problems there are to
solve and what renements might be made when “we” discuss graph searching.
Having walked through the castle with me, Clocksin and Mellish are by my side
as I learn to write code for maze-searching programs. When I return to my day
job as a writing teacher, I might ask students to comment on the eect of the
pronoun choice on the chapter’s tone or on the appropriateness of the stylistic
choice to its rhetorical context.
Like the Clocksin and Mellish passage, Sharon Wood’s paragraph introducing
Ollie Kreps’s family illustrates the general preference of published writers for
human subjects. Writing students picking out the subject-verb pairs would
nd that seven clauses have human subjects: Ollie Kreps, she, parents, Ollie and
her father, Albert Kreps, river men, Albert Kreps. e non-human subjects are
concentrated in the last two sentences: events, river, trac, milling, work, river,
mills, plowing and planting. e list of subjects captures the movement of the
paragraph, from Ollie to the social group that shaped her (her family), from her
father to the social group of which he was a part (river men), from river men to
the forces that governed their economic circumstances (the river trac, milling,
work, plowing and planting). Because Wood is a colleague of mine, I was able
to ask her, in a discourse-based interview, about the reasons for her stylistic
choices. She explained that, as a labor historian, it is important to her that
Albert Kreps’s unemployment and Ollie Kreps’s prostitution be understood not
only as the plight of individuals but as social phenomena. In crafting sentences,
she responds quite intentionally to concerns about both content and style.
In this passage, she chose concrete subjects and active verbs in the interest of
keeping the prose clear and direct; human subjects in the interest of telling an
engaging story; and subjects naming natural or economic forces in the interest
of accurately representing the historical context in which her “characters” lived.
e stylistic principle of preferring concrete, preferably human, subjects is
one that I like to teach: I want my students to know that using human subjects
can help them achieve clarity in their sentences and cohesion within their
paragraphs. But because academic writing often focuses on natural phenomena
or abstract concepts, academic writers do not always have a cast of characters
available to serve as subjects. e Scarry passage is an interesting example
because not only is the writer discussing an abstract concept, but her purpose
is to attribute agency to this abstraction. Not surprisingly, the passage has more
non-human than human subjects, with beauty itself serving as a subject in the
opening sentences: “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw