In The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, former United States President Barack Obama writes this 77-word sentence, suspending the 8-word main clause by the 69 words preceding it:
Many composition teachers would downgrade this sentence if Obama were their student. They would point to what they consider the excessive three conditions starting with if, the nonparallel cause-effect addition to the second condition, and the three equally inconsistent examples for the third condition. They would criticize as unnecessarily convoluted the strategy of making the third condition contrast with two. They would rip apart what they see as the ambiguous pronoun us (Obama means the USA), the confusing positive-negative construction increasingly less likely, the awkward to which we can deliver, and the melodramatic use of dashes.
Yet these apparent shortfalls are what make the sentence dramatic. In this chapter of the book, Obama is taking his readers on a philosophical journey to prove that the military of the past is no longer adequate to address the global threats of the present. Those last eight words create page-turning tension.
Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:
If nation-states no longer have a monopoly on mass violence; if in fact nation-states are increasingly less likely to launch a direct attack on us, since they have a fixed address to which we can deliver a response; if instead the fastest-growing threats are transnational—terrorist networks intent on repelling or disrupting the forces of globalization, potential pandemic disease like avian flu, or catastrophic changes in the earth's climate—then how should our national security strategy adapt?
Many composition teachers would downgrade this sentence if Obama were their student. They would point to what they consider the excessive three conditions starting with if, the nonparallel cause-effect addition to the second condition, and the three equally inconsistent examples for the third condition. They would criticize as unnecessarily convoluted the strategy of making the third condition contrast with two. They would rip apart what they see as the ambiguous pronoun us (Obama means the USA), the confusing positive-negative construction increasingly less likely, the awkward to which we can deliver, and the melodramatic use of dashes.
Yet these apparent shortfalls are what make the sentence dramatic. In this chapter of the book, Obama is taking his readers on a philosophical journey to prove that the military of the past is no longer adequate to address the global threats of the present. Those last eight words create page-turning tension.
Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:
- Part 1: James Baldwin on Artists
- Part 2: Stanley Karnow on the Vietnam Memorial
- Part 3: Steven Pinker on Human Progress
- Part 4: Martin Luther King Jr. on Injustice
- Part 5: Andrew Sullivan on Religious Fundamentalism
- Part 6: Carl Sagan on the Environment
- Part 7: Harold Bloom on Shakespeare
- Part 8: Richard Bradley on Openers
- Part 9: T. S. Eliot on Dante
- Part 10: Edward Albee on Carson McCullers
- Part 11: John Donne on Immortality
- Part 12: William Styron on Robert Penn Warren
- Part 13: Robert Hass on Rainer Maria Rilke
- Part 14:Lewis Thomas on Social Animals
- Part 15: Dana Gioia on the State of Poetry
- Part 16: Robert M. Pirsig on Experience
