On the Use of Two-Word Sentences

While I was teaching Writing Fundamentals in the spring, I ran across an article on Esquire.com entitled, "On Saying No," which explores what happens when one stops explaining and simply says "No," and begins like this:

"I had a high school English teacher named Mr. Turk, who insisted that the best sentences in the world were just two words. Subject and verb. He said our class had proven too dense to understand prepositions. 'We define the limitations of experience with action,' he said. So he had us practice one afternoon, on a single piece of paper, writing these two-word sentences, which he considered elemental. Irreplaceable, even. "Two words," he said. I worked.

"I do. I insist. You will. She flew."

I was intrigued at the time because, as a part of learning as a tutor, I had set up a meeting with an ESL instructor here at Desert Vista to talk with the Writing tutors about how she works with ESL students in her classes. She showed us how, to begin, she took them to the core of writing: two words, subject + verb. Everything they did after was adding more information onto the subject + verb combination. The Esquire article and the peek inside the ESL teacher's head inspired me to ask my Writing 100 students to build two-word sentences as a simple start-of-class journal assignment (I just wanted to see where it would go; I live much of my life as a writer working on a draft: see something interesting, try it out, see where it goes, learn, revise, revise, revise).

It went. I explained the assignment to my students. Ten two-word sentences, subject and verb, no repeated words. Some understood, and some looked at me like I was crazy. Two words? That's it? I told them to try it. They tried. Some wrote a mixture of subject+verb, adjective+noun or adverb+verb. Some coasted through, crafting simple sentences without investing much in the choice of subject or verb, or diving too far in to the relationship of the subject to the verb, much like the sample sentences from "On Saying No," pronouns or names attached to general verbs that apply to most people or things, verbs without much substance or verve.

Some, however, did as much as possible with their allotted word count. They wrote "Architects designed" or "Astronauts launched." They connected specific subjects to actions that those subjects were more likely to do than your average person on the street. They explored. They worked. They wrote.

I am thinking of these two-word sentences now for several reasons:
1. I often work with people who do not fully understand subjects and verbs.
2. I see people who put words down on paper, yet do not fully understand the meaning of what they are putting down on paper.
3. I help people learn to see how sentences can string together to form a thread of thought.
4. I think writing two-word sentences could be a useful strategy in a developmental Writing classroom becauses it asks for focus yet provides efficiency--there are no extra words getting in the way.
5. Building two-word sentences, and I mean the good ones, the specific ones that maximize their size, helps people understand one of the key principles of editing: use only meaningful words that you need. No fluff. I like to think of writers editing their papers like runners think of their training their bodies: lean, fast, no extra muscle-for-the-sake-of-muslce, only what is necessary for the purpose of running fastfastfast or farfarfar.

The idea of the two-word sentence has been swimming around in my brain for awhile, and, for a combination of those reasons, has now bobbed to the surface.

They could be used to help people see the different stages in a process (a part of learning to write is learning to think, which involves differentiating between Step No.1, Step No.2, Step No.3, etc.; people must see these before they can organize a paper around them). This could be done by supplying the subjects (say, the people involved in building something or the ingredients in meal--who knows what else) and asking for the verbs that mark the stages of the process. This morning I thought of showing scenes from films, choosing 2- or 5- or even 10-minute chunks of all kinds of movies, and asking for a summary built of only two-word sentences.

They could be used to discuss the possible strength of verbs (thank you Pat C. Fellers for teaching me not to settle for am, are, is, was, were, have, has, had, be, being, been and instead digging and rearranging to fit a strong, specific verb in my sentences). Verbs are the strongest words (again, according to Mr. Turk, "We define the limitations of experience with action.") we can write, and stronger writers are made by asking student writers to find stronger words, more efficient words, words that can carry more weight for longer distances. This could be done by supplying specific subjects--from architects and astronauts to zoologists and zephyrs--and, again, simply asking for correlating verbs (or supplying verbs--from analyze and ascend to zigzag and zap--and asking for appropriate subjects).

They could also be used to ask budding writers to observe their world by sending them out into the field--campus, mall, baseball game, the bus ride across town--to identify specific nouns and their specific actions, and return with a notepad full of two-word sentences in which can be glimpsed the life, population, action, and general feel of the area they just spent their time in.

I'm a believer in using simple processes (simple machines! walking! dragging a pen across paper!) to accomplish larger and more complicated things. The two-word sentence could be one of the simple machines of writing, highly-efficient and easily adaptable and thus able to work well to serve an unknowable number of purposes.