Six that were packed wrongly
Six sentences. One packaging error each.
1. The address, it turned out to be a bakery.
2. In my city it has three universities.
3. The reason she left, it was money.
4. My grandmother she never went back.
5. Because of the drought, it forced them to move.
6. About the money they sent home, it was more than they kept.
Four legal ways to move something to the front
From a piece about a family archive
My grandmother arrived in 1971 with an address on the back of an envelope. The address turned out to belong to a bakery.
It was the baker, not the address, who mattered. She took my grandmother in for three weeks and never mentioned it again, and what my grandmother remembered afterwards was not the kindness but the smell of the ovens at four in the morning.
In the box of papers there is a photograph of that street, taken in the 1980s. Nothing in it is recognisable now except a corner and the angle of a wall.
What is not in the box, and what nobody thought to write down, is the baker’s name.
Six sentence-openings from that text. Match each to what it is doing.
The four tools
Getting the given thing to the front
| Tool | How | When |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Choose the subject | Make the given thing the grammatical subject, actively or passively | Almost always. This is the ordinary case, and Unit 22 gave you the passive for it |
| 2 · Front an adverbial | In 1971, she arrived… · After the drought, families began to leave… | When time or place is what links this sentence to the last |
| 3 · Cleft it | It was the baker who mattered. · What she remembered was the smell. | When one element is genuinely the point and you are prepared to spend a clause saying so |
| 4 · Use an existential | There is a photograph of that street in the box. | When something is entering the text for the first time and has nothing to attach to |
So English does front topics. It fronts them with a cleft, and a cleft costs a whole extra clause — it was … who, what … was. That cost is the point: because it is expensive, it is read as emphasis, and a text full of clefts is a text shouting at every sentence.
Portuguese fronting is free — Esse livro, eu já li — so it can be used constantly without meaning anything special. Transferred into English without the clause, it produces a sentence with two subjects and no emphasis at all.
And one more principle: heavy things go last
| Awkward | Better | Why |
|---|---|---|
| That the scheme had failed was obvious. | It was obvious that the scheme had failed. | The long clause moves to the end |
| She gave the woman who ran the bakery the envelope. | She gave the envelope to the woman who ran the bakery. | The heavy phrase goes last |
| A photograph of the street taken in the 1980s is in the box. | In the box there is a photograph of the street, taken in the 1980s. | New and heavy, both at the end |
Rewrite each sentence using the word given, keeping the emphasis described.
The baker mattered, not the address. WAS
She remembered the smell of the ovens, not the kindness. WHAT
Nobody wrote the baker’s name down. NEVER
Three universities are in my city. THERE
That the two changes happened together was the problem. IT
Packing on purpose
Eight gaps. Choose the opening that starts from what the reader already has.
My grandmother arrived in 1971 with an address written on an envelope. turned out to belong to a bakery, not a house. who ran it took her in for three weeks. weeks are almost the whole of what I know about her arrival. she remembered afterwards was not the kindness but the smell of the ovens. the box of papers a photograph of the street, taken much later. in it is recognisable now except a corner. nobody thought to write down is the baker’s name.
Eight sentences. Seven contain a packaging error; one is correct.
1. The photograph, it was taken in the 1980s.
2. In the box has a photograph of the street.
3. What she remembered it was the smell.
4. It was the baker who she mattered.
5. That the two changes happened together was the whole problem. — grammatical but heavy at the front
6. She gave the woman who had run the bakery for thirty years the envelope.
7. What is not in the box is the baker’s name. — correct as written
8. About the three weeks, they are all I know.
Repack it
Task card · Pairs · 10 minutes · Writing
Take a paragraph you wrote in Lesson 1 or 2 — or write six quick sentences about somebody who moved — and repack it.
Five minutes repacking, five comparing.
- Underline the first three words of every sentence. Mark each: old or new.
- Rewrite so that every sentence but the first opens with something the paragraph has already given.
- Use each of the four tools at least once: subject choice, fronted adverbial, cleft, existential.
- Use the cleft once only, on the thing that genuinely matters most.
The one-cleft rule. A cleft says "this, and not the alternatives". Two clefts in a paragraph say it twice, and the second one weakens the first. If everything is the point, nothing is.
What repacking changed
Two questions.
1. What happened to the length when you repacked?
2. Where did you put the cleft?
Four tools, one principle
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. How does English front a topic?
2. Where do heavy elements go?
Next. Twenty-six minutes holding three positions on one question, with a listener whose job is to say when they lost the thread.