Roy Peter Clark / The Poynter Institute

My favorite writing exercise involves the revision of a single sentence about a funeral service held at the Georgia Aquarium for a beluga whale, dead from a bacterial infection. The loss of the charismatic mammal was deeply felt and inspired a public ceremony of mourning. Mark Davis covered the event for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a moving account that included this sentence:

The crowd gathered and knelt around the 12-foot creature.

This is a fine sentence, but I’ve argued that it could be better and have offered a revision more aligned to the writer’s mission and purpose.

When I teach this example, I challenge the writers in the classroom or audience to make the repair: “Try to improve this sentence,” I say, “without adding or deleting or changing a word. See if you can improve it by taking Mark’s words and moving them around.” A number of revisions are suggested, but my favorite goes like this.

The crowd gathered around the 12-foot creature and knelt.

Most readers agree that moving “knelt” to a position of emphasis next to the period – or what the Brits more accurately call the full stop – lends the sentence some added weight, some “gravitas” if you prefer. But why? If we can answer that question, we can begin to unravel the complex web of language that best captures meaning and emotion.

One way to describe our sample sentence is to say that it issimple. That word does not mean that the sentence is “simplistic” or “simplified.” “Simple” has a technical meaning in this context: that the sentence consists of one, and only one, independent or main clause — that is, a group of words with a subject and verb that can stand alone as a complete thought.

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