The Mechanics and Rhetoric of Conversation : Page 50

But there are several rhetorical matters without which one cannot achieve St. Paul's requisite edge of liveliness. A good conversationalist must get away from over-co-ordination and overgeneralization. At the beginning of this chapter I related how my pastor regretted my continuous boyish use of and then in telling a story. That was over-co-ordination. It is the tendency of all children and all untrained or unthinking people. They tend to string together all of their ideas, heavyweight and featherweight alike, in simple and in compound sentences. They should, of course, put only their heavyweight ideas into main clauses (simple or compound sentences), while their featherweight ideas should be in phrases or in the subordinate clause of a complex sentence. Instead of saying, "After I had finally parked the car, I started looking for the hardware store," they say, "I parked the car, and then I looked for the hardware store." The constant use of and or so between main clauses, one of which should really be reduced to a clause beginning with after or because or when, is the besetting vice of eight out of ten who read this