by Juan Claudio S. Castro
A magical word exists in English, one that forcefully establishes the truth and weight of an action performed. Notwithstanding its brevity, it endows a sentence with great impact via highlighting that the action really takes place. It also draws specific attention to the verb. An English user frequently employs it to justify something or to repulse a statement contrary to his. It is the emphatic “do.” “Do” (“does” for singular subjects) appears before an action verb and underlines the execution of the action as in “The aircraft mechanic does check the plane’s engine before any flight.” The emphatic hand of the verb can’t be strongly felt in the sentence sans “do”: “The aircraft mechanic checks the plane’s engine before any flight.”
Grammatically, “do” reflects the number and tense of the action verb, leaving this action verb in its infinitive form. In the example above, since the verb is a singular, present one, a singular, present form of “do” is used, that is, “does.” Should the statement have a plural subject such as “The aircraft mechanic and the supervising engineer . . . ” which calls for a plural verb, that is, “check,” “do” is called for (“do check”). The same goes for a past action, but, this time, we don’t reflect the verb’s number (whether the subject is singular or plural, only one past-tense verb is employed [“checked”]). If we shall engage the emphatic “do” to point out the action denoted by the verb, the verb phrase must be “did check.” As the foregoing information shows, the brief word “do” is a handy communicative tool in expressing concise statements whilst pulling off an emphatic intent such as in justification and argumentation.
The next emphatic construction runs counter to English grammar. It runs on to defeat the elementary grammatical rule that a set of words must inherently have a subject, predicate, and complete thought to be a sentence. It runs on to enjoy the right to be a sentence without said basic constituents and crowns itself with a period. Yes, this emphatic structure is a run-on (pun intended). A run-on is a phrase that stands as a sentence. As such, it can be a noun phrase, verb phrase, adjective phrase, adverb phrase, prepositional phrase, or a combination of these phrases. We normally read books, magazines, and other print, looking for a specific piece of information or to grasp the entire message or to know the whole story of something interesting. We comprehend details via wading across words, expecting subconsciously that every sentence and independent clause has a subject, verb, and other complimentary sentence components before the period. The moment our eyes step onto a group of words or even just a single word that presents itself as a sentence with a corresponding period beside it, we often pause. These words suddenly break our grammatical expectation about the integrity of sentences and independent clauses. This hap represents a typical encounter with run-ons. At the same time, this instance illustrates the limelight given by run-ons to ideas in a text. Run-ons clinch readers’ attention through grammatical infraction, thereby marking the emphasis attached to these expressions. The highlighting capability of run-ons also comes through isolating the mere idea denoted by the phrase. An example of a run-on is “without any excuse” in “Janice, the managing editor of The Spotlight House magazine, wants every major celebrity event covered by the team. She wants every reporter on the go, ready to get through a myriad of other journalists in the event. Without any excuse. As a result, the reporters in the company are competitive, thriving, results-oriented.” “Without any excuse” is a prepositional phrase that points out the meaning that not an excuse of the reporters is acceptable to Janice in not to be proactive and not to get across media competitors in celebrity events.
The next emphatic tool that comes to your mind might be exclamation point. It may have popped up on your head right at the title of this article. Well, yeah, it’s a highlighting device like the others. Broadly, thoughts delivered with an exclamation point reflect the strong feelings of the sender, by which he aims to impact the judgment of the reader as to the claim. This punctuation mark mostly mirrors the emotions of, and emotional assessment by, the sender relative to the topic. It signals the participation of the sender’s personal priorities and sharp feelings as he advances a proposition judged to be compelling. In a nutshell, emphasis by exclamation points is anchored on emotions.
All these said, I, however, don’t recommend using this emphatic tool frequently. Even several occurrences of it may sound eerie and certainly tamps down the impact of your writing. I know you already imagined and understood: frequent employment of exclamation point makes your text emotional and exaggerated. It’s like shouting to readers on paper. This, certainly, doesn’t seem normal unless you’re down to making an urgent, often matter-of-life-and-death complaint.
Another punctuation of emphasis is dash. A dash is twice the size of a hyphen and sets off coordinated constituents situated either at the middle or conclusion of the sentence. Specifically, we employ it as a dramatic prelude to a series of noun phrases, where it puts a press on the act of itemizing things like in “The three chess legends of the world—Jose Raul Capablanca, Garry Kasparov, and Magnus Carlsen—have a bunch of brilliant games” and “The world presently faces three major problems—territorial rows, the coronavirus disease 2019, and global warming.” When a dash deals with coordinated constituents at the middle of the sentence, the enumeration ends with another dash, as in the second example. The enumerative counterparts of dash are colon, parentheses, and comma, which function the same way but in a hush tone.
Often, being first in a line or at the top of a list tells about authority, significance, esteem, or value. English grammar operates reversely: placing things at the end or towards the end of the sentence connotes the importance given by the sender to these entities. Simply, the tail end of the sentence is the throne of emphasis. Next week, we explore structures that stand on this rule. We shall imbibe their respective properties and integrate these accentuating constructions in our communicative repertoire.
