‘It was, nevertheless, important’: another mini writing lesson, I'm afraid.

I spend a lot of time trying to show students how to create dynamic transition sentences: sentences with confidence and precision, with some direction. Sentences that know why they are going and where they are going. My students are often writing critical essays, and sometimes creative pieces, but whether you are writing creative or critical pieces of writing you still need a structured argument. You need to know what your errand is and where you are heading. What you need to tell your reader without disturbing them too much; without taking them too far away from the crucial plot.

Take this short paragraph from Nella Larsens’s novel, Passing (1929).

But undistinctive as the dance had seemed, it was, nevertheless, important. For it marked the beginning of a new factor in Irene Redfield’s life, something that left its trace on all the future years of her existence. It was the beginning of a new friendship with Clare Kendry.

Conjunctions remind us that some sort of leaning in or leaning out is going on. Some swivelling of parts, some degree of pivoting back and around and forward. We are shifting the direction of our gaze, refocusing. Adjusting our limbs, our joints. If we think of writing as an embodied practice then conjunctions are joints and joints need to be kept well oiled and limber; well-articulated, nicely stretched out. ‘But’ and ‘for’, are doing the work of realigning our point of view before we land on the definite statement that announces a shift in narrative circumstances: ‘It was the beginning of a new friendship with Clare Kendry.’ The conjunctions here are doing the same work as ‘because’ might; they are spelling out why something has happened; or at least that something has happened. They are bearing the compressed weight of the narrative frame. Conjunctions bear the body weight of a sentence. Legs leaning in, toes pointing, directing us to watch, to look.

Critical writing is no different: we need to know what the turn of events is, where we are heading, what has altered since we last looked at our subject. What is the shift in circumstances? What has happened to our subject? Let’s take Hamlet again and the gravedigger scene.

But as unremarkable as this scene may at first seem, it is nevertheless, crucial to our overall view of the play. For it marks the beginning of a new language and cultural aspects that cannot be ignored. With the introduction of the gravedigger we are reminded that beyond the court there are ordinary people ready to cast aspersions on those who break Christian codes — suicides, outcasts, the dispossessed — Ophelia. And so we begin to re-evaluate the nature of innocence; begin to see straying youth and innocence in a different light. That Ophelia is royal, and therefore elect in the social sense, makes her fallen or sinful state (according to Christian doctrine) more shocking.

‘Nevertheless’, that wonderfully charismatic and important adverb, needs more explanation. She will come next.

(‘. . . it was nevertheless, important.’ But what is ‘it?’ ‘It’ is your subject).