In this Writing is Thinking sentence makeover, I tackle a jargon-filled sentence of literary criticism, published in a Bloomsbury Academic anthology.
The author writes:
- The comestible sensations that precede both the achieved reminiscence and its inherent condition of emotional repose are a sensorimotor dramatization of the fact that a “feeling of tendency” is being conveyed to his memory by his taste buds.
Whew! This sentence is a mouthful. It feels impossible to decipher on its own, out of context. To revise the sentence, I turned to the rest of the essay to look for clarification about some of the abstract terms, like “sensorimotor dramatization.” Even with the context, I was left with some uncertainty about what the sentence is doing: what it is uniquely contributes to the essay and why it has come into existence.
First, this sentence is full of difficult phrases, like “comestible sensations,” “achieved reminiscence,” “inherent condition” and “sensorimotor dramatization.” (It only takes a short time with an editor to identify your persistent writing tendencies. This sentence is overflowing with abstract adjective-noun pairings, as many of other sentences in the essay are.)
These difficult phrases are not even real jargon–is there any scholarly field that where “comestible sensation” is the appropriate technical term for “taste”? This sentence is ultimately about something universally accessible: the relationship of taste and memory. But it does not permit many readers to discover what the author has to say about the topic.
The sentence also suffers from weak construction, in a familiar academic way. (It is yet another lengthy sentence built around an “is/are”). We can break the sentence into separate lines to visualize its structure.
The comestible sensations
that precede
both the achieved reminiscence
and its inherent condition of emotional repose
are a sensorimotor dramatization
of the fact that
a “feeling of tendency”
is being conveyed
to his memory
by his taste buds.
To start transforming this sentence into smaller sentences, I looked at what the author had already told the reader at this point in the text. The sentence comes in the second paragraph after a long block quote from the novel Ulysses by James Joyce. The author had not already noted that “comestible sensations” in the passage precede the character’s reminiscence. So I broke the first clause into its own sentence, with a clear reason for existence: “In the passage, a variety of tastes lead up to the moment of Bloom’s reminiscence, when he recalls a memory that brings him emotional repose and satisfaction.” Here, I added some helpful context clues, like the fact that the author is discussing the quote. I also introduced a subject to the sentence, Bloom–someone who does things, like taste and remember–so that “comestible sensations” are not the subject. And finally I translated the sentence’s abstract phrases to the best of my ability.
Once I established the order of events in the passage with this new sentence, I tried to translate the heart of the original sentence: what is a sensorimotor dramatization of a fact? And what is the fact in question?
In other sections of the essay, I discovered that the quote, a “feeling of tendency,” is a technical phrase from William James. The author is making a crucial connection between James’ ideas and the passage in the novel. But because there are at least three authors being discussed in the paragraph, I made the reference to James explicit. I think making the connection to James is the reason for this sentence’s existence–a task that the preceding and following sentences in the essay do not do. I pieced together ideas from other parts of the essay to render the rest of my interpretation:
- In the passage, a variety of tastes lead up to the moment of Bloom’s reminiscence, when he recalls a memory that brings him emotional repose and satisfaction. This sequence illustrates the sensorimotor nature of James’ idea of the “feeling of tendency.” In the process of experiencing the flavors of his sandwich and wine, but before being fully immersed in his memory, Bloom is in a transitive, fringe state, initiated by his physical sensations.
Whether this is an accurate version of the author’s original sentence is an open question, one that could only be settled by the author. But an author does not typically have the opportunity to hear what the reader thinks she is saying and to affirm or correct the reader’s interpretation. To write accessibly, consider whether a reader — the particular reader you hope to reach–will share your understanding of your most challenging phrases. Will they give the same answer as you to questions like: what is a comestible sensation? Or a sensorimotor dramatization? Don’t abandon the reader to make up their own answer.
An author does not often have the opportunity to hear what the reader thinks she is saying–and to affirm or correct the reader’s interpretation.