Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

160 Understanding Rational Decision Making

to use parallelism. Abraham Lincoln used parallelism to great persuasive effect in the Gettysburg

Address (see pp. 73–74).

Sentences and clauses in parallel can be read and comprehended more quickly than those that are

not.^162 In a study of readers reading parallel sentences, 72 undergraduates were timed as they read

each sentence in a set of 60 sentences. Each sentence consisted of two clauses that either were or

were not parallel. Each sentence also varied according to style (e.g., active voice versus passive voice,

animate object versus inanimate object). For each style of sentence tested, the undergraduates read

the second clause consistently faster when the fi rst clause was parallel to it.^163 A similar study of

readers reading parallel clauses in compound sentences demonstrates that when syntactic structures

are the same in both clauses, recall is enhanced regardless of the particular syntactic form tested.^164

Active Voice in Most Cases

Aids to the second subprocess in sentence comprehension, semantic analysis, make it easier for the

audience to grasp the conceptual relationships, or case roles, among the words in a sentence such as

the agent, object, instrument, or location.^165 In other words, they make it easier to determine who

did what to whom. Semantic analysis is typically easier for audiences when sentences are written

in the active voice than when they are written in the passive voice.^166

Active voice sentence: Our firm made a profit.

Passive voice sentence: A profit was made by our firm.

In most cases, audiences not only fi nd active sentences easier to comprehend than passive ones, they

also fi nd them easier to recognize and recall.^167 Passive sentences are especially diffi cult to understand

when they give sentences the wrong focus.^168 For example, the passive sentence in the previous box

would present even more diffi culties to audiences in the context of a paragraph about “our fi rm” since

its grammatical subject makes the focus of the sentence “a profi t” as opposed to “our fi rm.”

Sentences in which the verb expresses the action and the subject identifi es the actor (as is the case for

most but not all active sentences) are more concrete and easier for audiences visualize than other types of

sentences. Thus, semantic analysis goes more smoothly when the action of a sentence is expressed as an

active verb rather than as a nominalized verb^169 or as part of a multiple-word noun string.^170

Action as a nominalized verb: Our expectation was that we would get invited.

Actor as subject, action as verb: We expected to get invited.

Action in a noun string: Event admittance tag distribution took place yesterday.

Actor as subject, action as verb: Yesterday, someone distributed tags that admit people to

the event.

A think-aloud study of professionals reading hard-to-comprehend government regulations

found that they spontaneously translated the abstract, passive-nominal sentences in regulations into

concrete, active-verbal sentences in order to better comprehend their meaning. When the regula-

tions were revised by making similar transformations, readers’ comprehension increased.^171 The

following before and after paragraphs illustrate this type of revision based on semantic analysis.^172