Expletive deleted...

So far, to make writing more concise, we have concluded that Anglo-Saxon is better than Norman-French, that redundancies must go, and that we must unsmother our verbs. That’s a good start, but it isn’t enough. We still need to face passives, circumlocution, and expletives.

Of those three, expletives are the easiest to recognize. They are also the hardest to uproot. Expletive, if you go back to the root, means “filled out”. Basically, an expletive is a grammatical form that we use when we don’t want to put the subject and verb where they are supposed to go. This is easier to understand with examples.

It seems…

There are…

It is…

There appears…

All of those are expletives. Nearly all begin with either “it” or “there” and are followed by what I call linking verbs (any form of to be, seem, appear, and others). The problem is not the expletive structure, or any of the verbs. The problem is how often the structure is used. I know I have read articles where nearly every sentence began “there are”, “it is”, “there is”, “there are”, “it seems”, “there are.” After about three or four sentences, I go to sleep. The grammatical structure itself is ponderous, unfocused, and soporific.

The best way to revise such sentences is to rethink them. Who is doing what to whom?

English is a language that relies heavily on positioning. That is, where a word occurs in a sentence tells you what it does. Generally, whatever is in the subject slot of the sentence is the actor. What is in the verb slot is the action. And what is in the object slot is what the actor acted upon. (We’ll get back to this when we talk about passives.) When you read English, that is the pattern you expect. You expect whatever word is in the subject slot to be the actor and whatever is in the verb slot to be the action. If you, as a writer, do not give the readers what they expect to see, you confuse them.

Now look at the expletives again. In the subject slot, we have two options: there and it. Neither of them is the actor. And in the verb slot, we have something that is not the action. All an expletive does is tell the reader to look for the actor and action somewhere else.

Why bother? Why not simply have the actor first and the action second? Try a few examples to see what I mean.

There are three parts to this report.

It is obvious from the results that…

There appears to be support in this analysis for…

There seems to be some disagreement…

There is reason to question…

Instead of using the expletive form, we can simply say, “This report has three parts”; “The results show…”; “The analysis supports…”; “The results contradict…”; “We can question…”

Do note how much shorter the second set of statements are. 

Now consider how we can really cause ourselves problems by combining an expletive with a smothered verb.

“As a very complex structure, it is dependent on the conditions present…”

“There is an accommodation everyone can all agree upon…”

Now consider these simpler statements:

“This complex structure depends on current conditions…”

“We can all accommodate…”

Most writers, however, especially scientists, have some difficulty making a straightforward statement of fact (in case they are wrong). However, a straightforward statement is easier to understand and respond to. If you have done a decent job of setting up an experiment or model, then the results should be straightforward statements of fact.

The interpretation might not be so straightforward, but that’s another issue.

(A comment here: English is flexible, and that is one of its strengths. We never have a single right answer in editing. And no prohibition in writing is absolute.)