In this Writing is Thinking sentence makeover, I highlight the verbs that get lost in a complex sentence with an em-dash clause. This sentence appears in book of philosophy from Columbia University Press.
The author writes:
- The decision not to investigate the appearance of arrogance but instead to take it at face value—to deny, to put it another way, the possibility of a distinction in a given case between arrogation and arrogance—in effect constitutes a rejection of philosophical conversation.
This sentence includes a clause between em dashes, which has the effect of the sentence interrupting itself. The interruption in this case is a clarification, “to put it another way.” This is a popular technique in academic writing. It adds emphasis and can make the prose feel more casual and spoken.
Food writer Deb Perelmen uses em-dash clauses liberally in her blog posts. She favors wildly long sentences with the cadence of an enthusiastic, fast talker. The second sentence in her recent post about risotto reads, “Even when I’ve accepted the work involved — most recipes tell you to separately have a pot of warm broth and to ladle it in, stirring, for the better part of an hour — the flavor, which often tastes odd to me when I used non-homemade broth, or the texture, which seems perfect for about 5 minutes and then often too gloppy, throws me.” This 62-word sentence works because a reader can follow the logic of risotto. The vocabulary is familiar, ordinary, and concrete.
This academic sentence does not share those features. The logic and the vocabulary are more challenging. This subject is abstract: “the decision.” We can easily make the sentence more concrete by asking, who decided, and what did they decide? From there the progression of ideas in the sentence become more clear: What did the agent deny in making this decision? What are the consequences of this decision? We even get our curiosity whetted to wonder, how and why are those the consequences of the decision? This sentence is the topic sentence of a paragraph that will develop the answer to this final question. It would be a more effective sentence if the reader did not have to work so hard to uncover this logic.
I read and reread the surrounding passage to figure out who the agent is who is deciding. To my surprise, it was not the author of the sentence, nor the author of the text that this writer is discussing. The decision-maker is someone/anyone who is reading philosophy and dismisses it because the philosopher seems arrogant. With this discovery, I realized that our writer’s paragraph has the structure of a modus tollens argument. She argues: if we aren’t willing to examine and question the appearance of an author’s arrogance, we cannot participate in philosophical conversation. (But we do want to participate in philosophical conversation). So we must figure out whether an apparently arrogant author is really writing with undeserved arrogance or with a valuable, earned (but risky) claim to authority. We should investigate the appearance of arrogance.
With this new understanding, I began to revise the sentence to be clearer. I wrote:
- Some readers might take an author’s appearance of arrogance at face value. They might think there is no way to discern whether an author is merely arrogant or is justified in arrogating the authority to speak for themselves. But if a reader takes this position, they are rejecting the possibility of philosophical conversation. All philosophical writing makes a claim to authority, albeit in a variety of tones.
This sentence comes from a book I used heavily in my own research. I read the book several times, and I did not ever feel confused while I read this passage. I did not pay special attention to this section until I chose this sentence to revise. Only as I interpreted and struggled to revise it, did I realize I had not understood the section after all. I discovered that this paragraph has fascinating things to say about why contemporary philosophers adopt the objective tone they do, and why certain, possibly arrogant, works of philosophy have been interpreted as anti-philosophical.
A good use of em dashes is fun for a writer and a reader. But both writer and reader must easily recognize what the emphasized clause is doing for the sentence.