End Your Sentences With Impact

End Your Sentences With Impact

WRITING FOR SUCCESS

By Gary Gilson

To create memorable impact for your readers, end your sentences with impact.

The great crime novelist Raymond Chandler challenged the notion of critics that he wrote mysteries; he confessed that he was “not much on plot”; instead, he said, he focused on character, scene, and dialogue. 

A master stylist, Chandler insisted on the importance of ending a sentence with impact.

He complained to a friend about the change an editor had made in one sentence. 

Chandler’s sentence ended, “  . . . and not too critically examine the artistic result.”

The editor changed it to, “ . . . and not examine the artistic result too critically.”

Chandler objected to the editor’s assumption that he “knows more (than the author) about phrase and cadence and the placing of words, and that he actually thinks that a clause with a strong (stressed) syllable at the end, which was put there because it was strong, is improved by changing the order so that the clause ends in a weak adverbial termination.”

In other words, a weak and clumsy ending to a sentence resembles the clunk-clunk-clunk of a freight train’s derailed caboose. 

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, that paragon of clear, cogent writing, an article about a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, designed to protect voting rights from Republican efforts to suppress likely Democratic votes, contained this sentence:

“The bill is a broad, imaginative, and ambitious set of responses to the most pressing challenges facing American democracy, many of which preceded the 2016 election, but almost all of which were brought into sharper focus by it.”

That sentence sins twice: first, in using the passive-voice verb “were brought,” and second, in using the clunky ending “by it.”

You can rework that sentence to produce a crisp result in any number of ways; consider this one:

The bill is a broad, imaginative, and ambitious set of responses to the most pressing challenges facing American democracy, many of which preceded the 2016 election, but almost all of which the bill brought into sharper focus.

Now “the bill” (in the last clause) becomes an active agent, eliminating the passive “were brought”, and “by it” vanishes and opens the door for the powerful ending “sharper focus.” Even the sound of “sharper focus” has the impact of finality. 

The producers of the laundry detergent Tide knew what they were doing when they named a new version of their product Tide XK. Was XK the real name of some secret chemical ingredient? No, there’s no such thing as XK. But it sure sounds cracked up to crush the dirt out of dirty duds.

The company certainly didn’t name the new version Tide LN. 

How about LN for a fabric softener?

Strengthen your writing by reading your first draft aloud, to get the sound and feel of your words and the structure of your sentences.

Ending sentences with impact helps make what you write say what you mean.

[June 2, 2019]