A million years ago, when I took my first drafting classes,
it was assumed that laying out a drawing required certain skills, and that those skills could be taught. Indeed, the learning of those skills was the primary focus of early-level drafting classes. Of course, the need for those skills still exists, but but the efforts to teach them have gone the way of the dodo bird, along with the teaching of syllogistic logic, sentence diagramming, and critical thought. Nowadays, the assumption is that the computer will do all of your thinking for you, and all you need to know is how to run AutoCAD. I wish I had a dollar for every hopelessly unreadable CAD file I’ve seen. Personally, I’d rather teach AutoCAD to a drafter than try to teach drafting to some hot-shot CAD jockey.
Among the things we were taught, back in the Stone Age, along with (dead serious) how to hone the points of a ruling pen and how to sharpen a drafting pencil, was to beware of lines in a drawing that define a surface that can’t exist in the world around us, such as the Three-Pronged, Single-Slotted Widget shown above. The Widget is fairly easy to accomplish on paper, but you can’t make it in the real world (although I have seen similar things in some of the nasty CAD files I’ve had to deal with!).
So what’s the point, you ask?
Simple. You can make the same mistakes writing that you can make drafting. You can have verb/noun mismatches, singular/plural mismatches, tense issues, etc. My (ahem) favorite is the mismatched list:
“You can hunt, fish, as well as water-ski.”
Um, no. Don’t do that. Do something like this:
“You can hunt or fish, as well as water-ski.”
“You can hunt and fish, as well as water-ski.”
“You can hunt, fish, or water-ski.”
More favorites:
Don’t do this:
“He went as far along the beach that he could.”
Do this:
“He went as far along the beach as he could.”
Don’t do this:
“Thankfully, the tide was out.”
Do this:
“He was thankful that the tide was out.”
Don’t do this:
“His goals in life were joining the Marines, going to college, buying a Corvette, a knife, and a dog.
Do this:
“His goals in life were joining the Marines, going to college, and buying a Corvette, a knife, and a dog.
These skewed structures, like the Single-Slotted, Three-Pronged Widget, lead our minds toward a goal we never reach. We set out thinking that we know where we’re going, but we end up somewhere else. Most English-speakers read a drawing from left to right. We see the square-sectioned, bar-with-a-slot-in-it structure of the left end, and we set off to the right, expecting to see a structure that matches. Instead, we see surfaces disappear, mass become empty space, slots turn to prongs. Confusion reigns.
If we begin to read a sentence, expecting a continuous structural backbone, and instead we find mismatched comparisons, dangling modifiers, incomplete ranges, and clauses that don’t fit together, then confusion is the inevitable result.
Don’t get me wrong. I like a little confusion in my reading, and I’m more than happy to throw a little into my writing. But I want situational confusion, not a confused style. I want questions that might be answered on the next page, or the next, or the next, not questions with no answers. I want such questions as “Will he . . . ?” “Can she . . . ?” “Do they . . . ?” I do not want “Hunh?”
