Everything in its place by Bill Kirton

An approximation of more or less any leading UK politico and THE leading US one.
By Poliphilo (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

I was sorting through (and chucking out) old notes and files this week and came across a cutting from way back when the appalling Michael Gove was Education Secretary. It concerned a 15-year-old schoolboy, Joe Cotton, who was the first ‘child’ (as the Guardian called him) ever to address the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers. He was speaking about some of Gove’s  cynical, sinister ideas, one of which was to get rid of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) to help with his budget cuts. This is what young Joe was quoted as saying: ‘Well, I don’t know how nifty Michael Gove thinks he can be with a loaf and some fishes, or even a bus pass and some textbooks, but he’d need nothing short of a miracle to replicate the benefits of EMA with that budget’.

First, I admire enormously a 15-year-old with the confidence to stand up in front of a hall full of teachers and articulate the feelings and ideas of his generation, and I’ve no doubt his words – and that sentence – were well received. But I saved the clipping to make a structural point about forming effective sentences. So many of them tail off, finish on a down beat and are consequently less powerful.

I'm not suggesting that is necessarily the case here. The word ‘nifty’ is good. It implies sleight of hand, ducking and diving, smoke and mirrors. Applying it to Gove as well as to one of Jesus’ miracles puts both it and the ‘miracle’ in a different light. There’s no longer the po-faced, respectful kow-towing to the specialness of divine intervention; instead it conjures up (see how subtle I was there?) a seedy bloke on a music hall stage with a wand, hat and rabbit – or, if you like, ‘a loaf and some fishes’.

So it’s good, and it’s worth a laugh. BUT…

The laugh has to be delayed while he finishes the rest of the sentence, and that ‘rest’ consists of a much weaker joke, then a serious political point and finally an ‘explanation’ of the loaf and fishes reference (in the word ‘miracle’). So, if we get rid of the weaker – and rather confusing – joke about bus passes, the sentence has 4 elements it needs to juggle:

1. the benefits of EMA,
2. the budget cuts,
3. the fact that 2 and 1 are mutually exclusive,
4. the gag about Gove being miraculously ‘nifty with a loaf and some fishes’.

It’s a good gag not only because it’s funny but also because it skewers Gove’s self-importance and calls attention to the sleight of hand involved in his economics. By rewriting the sentence and putting the elements in the above order, the gag is made even better and more effective because it’s now the punchline and also offers light relief after the seriousness of 1, 2 and 3. You can then, of course, refine it even further by moving around the words inside each element. It’s not rocket science but it does illustrate the important difference between writing and editing.

I wonder, for example, how much the wonderful Nora Ephron, who wrote When Harry Met Sally, juggled the 2 elements of Sally's line 'You’re gonna have to move back to New Jersey because you’ve slept with everyone in New York'. Try it. If you swap them around or relate them to each other differently, you get different emphases and therefore different jokes.

In schools, I get students to isolate the different elements in their own sentences, then move them around and see the changes that makes to their meaning, impact, power. It’s something I still do myself. And, of course, it’s not just for comic effects. Satire, irony, sarcasm, tension, misdirection - they all depend on the coexistence of distinct frames of reference operating simultaneously. In talks and workshops with readers and writers, I often digress into the tricks and effects we can get by establishing separate narrative layers.  At one level the subject is 'normal'; but interpose another level and he/she is simultaneously assessed through different criteria. You probably do it already but if you don’t, give it a try. You  could be pleasantly or, better still, unpleasantly surprised.