Day 280: People make better actors than concepts do.

Let’s start right away with an example, and then let’s discuss it. Consider this sentence.

“Allegiance to the nation causes a man to serve his community.”

The subject of this sentence is “allegiance.” “Allegiance” is a concept, an abstract idea. If I ask you to picture “allegiance” in your mind, you can’t do it. The reader will have the same problem. “Allegiance” cannot be visualized because it is a concept. Concepts don’t have a physical shape. They just are.

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To engage readers in the text, to keep them interested and focused, we want to give them something that they can picture. We also want our subjects to be capable of acting. Concepts don’t act; people do. For these two reasons, the subject of the sentence should be something that can act.

We can revise the sentence above to make “man” the subject. You can picture a man, and a man is capable of performing actions. With this in mind, one revision is as follows.

“A man with allegiance to his nation will serve his community.”