A famous story about James Joyce recounts how, after a day’s work, he told a friend he’d produced two sentences. The friend asked, “You’ve been seeking the right words?”
“No,” replied Joyce, “I have the words already. What I’m seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentences I have.”

This series of posts is about how to choose the most effective words to tell your story, and what to keep in mind as you make those choices.

Now we’ll talk about how you arrange those word—the order you put them in. The technical term for word order is syntax. English (and many other languages) usually organize the parts of a sentence with subject first, then verb, then object. No matter how baroquely convoluted a sentence becomes, how many phrases and predicates it includes, it usually follows a subject-verb-object order, as follows.
Jack ate the chicken (SVO)–not
The chicken ate Jack (OVS)
Ate Jack the chicken (VSO)
Jack the chicken ate (SOV)

This conventional order of sentence parts is something we absorb without thinking about it. Disrupting that order stands out and is called hyperbaton. It can give a pleasing break in the rhythm of the prose. Or it can be confusing. Sometimes, verb and subject are switched for poetic effect. For example: “Softly blows the nighttime breeze.” And, you can occasionally present words out of their accustomed order, for emphasis. Shakespeare did. You may have guessed that hyperbaton is a device to be used sparingly—and carefully. Where you’re likely to encounter it is in dialog for characters who are not native English speakers. In that usage, it immediately signals the person’s foreign origins. But, for most of my writing, as my Lithuanian manicurist would say, “I was not there going.”

Like subjects, verbs, and objects, when you use a string of adjectives, they have a conventional order too. When we violate that convention we may change the meaning or at the very least prompt a “Huh?” on the part of our reader. We don’t usually think about this. We don’t need to. The right order is ingrained.

Test yourself. Here’s a list of adjectives to modify the word “truck”:

big pickup American white disgraceful old

Quickly jot them down or number them in the order that feels right. Don’t struggle. Just write down what comes naturally. Was your order of adjectives more or less like this? Disgraceful big old white American pickup truck?

Here’s another try. These words modify the word “shirt”:

silk black long-sleeved Italian new overpriced

Was your order similar to this? overpriced new long-sleeved black Italian silk shirt?

There are 720 possible word orders for the set of truck adjectives and 5040 for the shirt set. I’m guessing the word order you chose is quite similar to mine. Why is that?

Obviously, there’s a reason. Adjectives in English almost always MUST be in this order: opinion first, then size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose NOUN. Opinion can be anything, even something you initially think of as factual. Thus, “beautiful blonde detective” versus “blonde beautiful detective.”

Who knew? As you’re reading, you may be surprised how often this adjective word-order rule is followed. Mostly unconsciously, on the author’s part. After writing this exercise I did run into a sentence that violated the rule. It wasn’t a catastrophe, but it did muddle the meaning. It mentioned a “comfortable old wingback red chair.”

Now if the world were full of red chairs, or they were some special category of chairs—a type of Chippendale, say—then “wingback” would distinguish this red chair from, say, a beanbag style red chair and might precede “red,” as the author had it. But neither of those conditions applies. To achieve a more precise phrase we’re left with following the rule: “comfortable (opinion) old red wingback chair.” Wingback chair being a specific type of chair, like dining room chair. You’d stumble over “dining room” if it appeared anywhere else in that phrase, as I did with “wingback.” For situations that aren’t so clear-cut, the rule is a handy thing to have.

Next Week: Those pesky adverbs!

To see previous posts in this series, covering nouns, verbs, and modifiers, click the “Writer’s First Draft” tab on my website home page (www.vweisfeld.com).