I’ve been doing a bit of research on local history recently, and, while reading about one of the churches, came across the following sentence:
“[The Sunday School teachers] spent a great deal of time with the children and on various programs, including Children’s Day and Christmas, in addition to regular schedule of Sunday School, and it was at Christmas time in 1924 that the first little church burned.”
That’s probably not the way that you were expecting that sentence to end! When I first read that, I thought it was the most ill-advised attempt to join two independent clauses with a conjunction that I’d ever encountered. The information that the church burned down struck me as the sort of thing that was really worthy of its own sentence. Maybe even its own paragraph, entirely separate from the other activities of the Sunday School.
When I shared this opinion with friends, however, one pointed out an obvious point: “You don’t know what the “various activities” they were doing with the children may have entailed. It is possible that conjunction is warranted!” And to be fair, I think that she was right, at least to a certain extent. I do think that the Sunday School kids burned down the church. My source was written in a very non-judgmental, “just the facts” style, with a steadfast refusal to draw any conclusions based on those facts. However, the facts are that the kids were at the church rehearsing the Christmas pageant, they “built a good fire in the coal stove in preparation for the evening program,” and they came back for the service “to find the building in flames.” I suspect that you could find cause and effect in at least a couple of those clauses.
Regardless, though, my opinion remains unchanged: the fire was still worthy of its own paragraph, separate from other Sunday School activities that did not involve burning the church down.
My friend, however, pointed out that the way that the writer had phrased things made it, “Passive-aggression [as] a highly developed art.” Which I had to admit had some truth to it, and it got me thinking about the women who had written that sentence. It was written in 1956, 32 years after the fire, by two women identified only by their husband’s names. I don’t know how old they were, but it occurred to me that if they were in their late 30s or older, they might remember the fire. In fact, they might very well have been part of the infamous Sunday school class that burned down the church. Thinking about that, the sentence seems a little different, doesn’t it?
All of that in turn got me thinking about different voices in a story. What a character says says can tell the reader a lot about that person, but how they say it can tell even more. An insult delivered by a gangster will sound one way, an insult by a perfectly mannered southern belle quite another—and an insult by someone who want to be a perfectly mannered southern belle but hasn’t mastered the art of the subtle put-down is still a third thing.
Language is a tool, for both the writer and the reader. Grammar is a suggestion—but exactly how you and your characters choose to use that suggestion is something that can reveal quite a lot of information.