until or if we get a writing theory forum going, grammar lessons here

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this is the nitty-bitty, minutiae stuff and will probably bore most people to yawning tears..

I had just finished a post elsewhere and came across something in my last sentence. here are the last few sentences, and pay special note to the final:

[font=courier]man, i had it right on the tongue, perfect wording, but then the thought fell to ashes. in any case, she hasnt stopped talking about it. laughing or smiling, she must have loved it far more than hated it. she is definitely glad she read it. She's looking forward to Cormac's sunset limited and she's gleamed a shine to house of leaves maybe after that. it's kind of cool to watch others and discuss thoroughly book reads you yourself fucking loved.[/font]

The last sentence, for some reason, probably because of how complicated it was, read correctly but didnt at the same time. i had to break it apart for clarity, to make certain it read correctly:

[b][font=courier] it's kind of cool to watch others and discuss thoroughly book reads you yourself fucking loved.[/font][/b]

this is part of the sort of unsexy shit you have to deal with when writing, making certain that every sentence is a full, complete thought. i had to break it apart. at first, i had a difficult time locating matches between objects and verbs, and it's usually easier, grunt wise, to simplify a sentence:

[b][font=courier]It's kind of cool to watch others book reads you yourself fucking loved.[/font][/b]

it made no sense, so either the entire sentence was a bastardized version of a complete thought, or i was a victim of my own oversight.

I reconstructed the sentence and tried to pull it apart in other ways, to see it more clearly. I liked the sentence and didnt want to give up on it, but i had to see it clean and clear before i shared the thought, so i flayed it to the particle elements and reconnected some of the dots at odd ends:

[b][font=courier] it's thoroughly cool to watch others book reads you loved.[/font][/b]

Needless to say, it didnt make any more sense than the sense that it didn’t make a draft before. I put the complete thought back together:

[b][font=courier] it's kind of cool to watch others and discuss thoroughly book reads you yourself fucking loved.[/font][/b]

I almost sent it to the recycling bin, but I don’t like to give up. I broke it into subject, verb, predicate--which i should have fucking done in the first lovely place because sometimes youre not saving yourself any time by shortcutting right to the most basic word or answer--and the sentence read clearly:

Object .......: it's kind of cool to watch others and discuss
Verb ..........: thoroughly
Predicate ...: book reads you yourself fucking loved

in this sentence, the Subject and the predicate are the same thing, but only because the Subject trails the end of the complete thought.

I remember back in school, you would have teachers try to tell you that knowing and isolating verbs were important, and how not to use gerunds or dangling modifiers, but that shit never made sense, and i couldnt retain any of it. three and a half years ago, when i started writing, i spent the first few months with grammar books, and that was the first time i learned that Subjects could be more than a word in length. that there could be more than one verb in a sentence, and that a thought and a sentence were not by default mutually in exclusion, these things would just never make sense to me. i literally had no idea. looking at sentences now, i have a few tools to comprehend the thoughts that dont read quite right from time to time. I thought i'd share.
-kabol

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