Last Updated  July 14, 1999
 
 


Level Five:
Style and the Eight Additional Constructions


Interjections

First-Person Subordinate Clauses as Interjections

     Most teachers will probably agree that even many college Freshmen fill their papers with too many statements that begin with "I believe ..." or "I think that ...." Teachers often tell students that, in revising, they can usually simply cross out these words, but the question is Why should they?  The primary reasons are that such writing shifts the focus to the writer -- and away from what the writer is trying to say, and that such writing suggests immaturity.
     The argument that such writing shifts focus to the writer and away from what the writer is trying to say is validated by our model of how the brain processes language. According to that model, every word in every sentence -- except interjections -- is eventually chunked to the S/V/C pattern of a main clause. Because every word in a sentence is being chunked toward the words in main S/V/C patterns, these words are obviously in focal positions -- centers of psychological attention. In

I think the bridge is safe.
"I" occupies the main subject position; "think," the main verb position; and "the bridge is safe" shares the complement position. Psycholinguistically, we might go so far as to suggest that, as a result, the "I think" gets two thirds of the attention in this sentence. Obviously, situation is significantly different in
The bridge is safe.
Our model, in other words, suggests that the problem is one of focus.
     But it is actually much more than that. Mature writers occasionally use "I think ..." or "I believe that...," but they rarely do so at the beginning of a sentence. In mature writing, we are much more likely to find:
The bridge is, I think, safe.
According to our psycholinguistic model, the brain, having dumped the previous main clause to long-term memory, will be looking for the subject of the next main clause. Thus, in this example, "bridge" will still be read as the main subject, and "is" as the main verb. The reading process is then interrupted by ", I think," which, I suggest, the brain will process as an interjection before it goes on to find the main complement in "safe." 
   Why do mature writers do this? Why don't they simply leave out the "I think"? Didn't their teachers teach them? Or didn't they pay attention to their teachers? Good mature writers, I would suggest, rarely pay attention to the grammar books or grammar teachers -- they pay attention to the language. The "I think" serves a purpose in that it qualifies the clause in which it is embedded. In effect, it says "I'm not positive about this.," or "I'm not as sure about this as I am about everything else I wrote, but it is still relevant and helps make my case." When used infrequently by good writers, such interjected clauses tag sentences so that good readers can see that the writer realizes that some of the writer's reasons are stronger than others. This can be a very important stylistic device because, as opposed to the young writer who fills the page with "I think," these tags suggest that the writer really is thinking -- evaluating his or her arguments and noting (tagging)  some may need more support. They work their best, of course, when they appear on sentences containing arguments that the reader also considers relatively weak.

     Proving my point is impossible because one cannot prove a negative, i.e., no matter how many examples are provided of writers who do not use "I think," etc., there may be millions more that do. Teachers and students therefore need to explore this question for themselves by examining the work of good writers. It is, however, possible to look at some examples of the probable meaning of interjectional "I think":


     Louis L. Martz uses "I think" once in his eighteen-page essay, "Wallace Stevens: The World as Meditation."  He does so immediately after quoting three lines from Stevens' poetry:
That is completely waste, that moves from waste
To waste, out of the hopeless waste of the past
Into a hopeful waste to come.
Martz then writes:
"The hopeful waste of the future, I think, alludes to the sort of world proffered by Mr. Burnshaw, whose name adorns the original title of the second part:...." (Wallace Stevens: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Marie Borroff, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963. 139.)
What are we to make of this "I think"? Does it mean that Martz doesn't think the hundreds of other statements he makes in the essay? Obviously not.