Tuesday Thought: Stark attachments 3

A third candidate for a stark attachment is a sentence with two (or more) verbs. The first two candidates, remember, were a pair of sentences with the same subject and a sentence with a who or which clause.

Consider this sentence from a piece by Jim Holt in the March 3 New Yorker, on the work of Stanislas Dehaene, a Paris-based neuroscientist exploring the brain’s wiring for math:

He pointed to the little furrow where the number sense was supposed to be situated, and observed that his had a somewhat uncommon shape.

The furrow is in a model of Dehaene’s brain. Note the two verbs, pointed and observed. Holt could have converted one of them to a stark attachment at the front of the sentence:

Pointing to the little furrow where the number sense was supposed to be situated, he observed that his had a somewhat uncommon shape.

In the middle:

He observed, pointing to the little furrow where the number sense was supposed to be situated, that his had a somewhat uncommon shape.

Or at the back:

He pointed to the little furrow where the number sense was supposed to be situated, observing that his had a somewhat uncommon shape.

Holt left the compound predicate because he used a stark attachment two sentences later:

Cradling the pastel-colored lump in his hands, a model of his mind devised by his own mental efforts, Dehaene paused for a moment.

The common form would have been:

Dehaene cradled the pastel-colored lump in his hands, a model of his mind devised by his own mental efforts, and paused for a moment.

Holt’s next sentence kept the common:

Then he smiled and said, “So, I kind of like my brain.”

This could have been:

Then, smiling, he said, “So, I kind of like my brain.”

 Or:

Then he smiled, saying, “So, I kind of like my brain.”

Four points, then, on the stark attachment. First, the part starkly attached should be the lesser of two ideas, subordinated to the greater. If the two ideas are of equal weight, use the common form. Second, the earlier the stark attachment—at the front of the sentence rather than in the middle or at the back—the more the emphasis on it. Third, watch the length, especially when separating the subject from its verb. Fourth, don’t overuse it. Holt had three sentences with two verbs in one paragraph, each a candidate for a stark attachment. He used it for just one.