When you make people your subjects, you instantly raise the readability and interest level of your sentences. People are interested in other people and what they are doing. And even more than that, people are interested in things that involve them personally. So rather than placing other things in the subject role of your sentences, try to more often put people, groups, or organizations at the start of your sentences. And whenever possible, directly address your reader as the subject. Let's look at an example:
There may be a concern on the part of many employees that they do not fully understand their benefits.
The grammatical subject of this sentence is the word there. It contains no hint of any people that may be involved in the sentence. In fact, the structure there is, or in this case there may be, is called a false subject–an empty stand-in for the true subject of your sentence. Let's look further to try to find some people.
The next noun we find is concern–an abstract concept. It is the "real" subject that the false subject there is alluding to. So we have to go even further into the sentence to find some people. The next noun is part–still no people.
Finally, 11 words into the sentence, we find employees. These are the human beings who are having the concern that the sentence is about. Let's put them as the subjects of the sentence:
Employees may be concerned that they do not fully understand their benefits.
Now we clearly have people as the subject of our sentence. But have we missed an opportunity to talk directly to our reader? If we can talk directly to "you," the sentence will be even better. Is our reader one of the "employees" we are talking about? If so, we could do this:
You may be concerned that you do not fully understand your benefits.
Once we see the sentence that way, then we may realize that this is actually something we should ask the reader, rather than telling:
Are you concerned that you do not fully understand your benefits?
But maybe the employees themselves are not our audience. Maybe we are addressing business owners or human resources professionals, and we truly are talking about the employees with our reader. In that case, we could try this:
Your employees may be concerned that they do not fully understand their benefits.
But, you may be thinking, was there anything wrong with the original sentence? Not grammatically. And in fact, because all of the words in that sentence are short, it may even get a better score on Word's readability statistics than some of these others. But what it lacks is the important move of making people your subjects. Am I saying that you have to make people the subject of every sentence? Of course not. But I am saying that doing so more often will improve your writing.
Challenge: Make People or Organizations Your Subject
Find the people in these sentences and make them the subjects. Use "you" to directly address the reader when possible. Caution: sometimes the people involved are not literally mentioned in the original sentence. (Send your answers directly to me.)
- There were some analyses conducted by NIH that show that sitting at a desk all day is not healthy.
- There are many ways in which online assessments can help management identify strengths and weaknesses among staff members.
- The transition from management into the executive suite may require a reorientation of thinking.
- When the mentoring of potential is an important goal, developing a prototype of the relationship may be helpful.