The McCollumn - 1/20: "Eliminate the imperative"

We speak scores of sentences daily, but we often fail to take notice of how we use the sentences we speak.

What function do they serve?

Are you a steadfast declarative denizen, stating ideas as you see them and think them, simply to inform the world around you?

Are you inclined toward the interrogative, forever peppering friends and random passers-by with a litany of questions, both necessary and rhetorical?

Perhaps you favor the exclamatory. For you, life is full of excitement, vim, vigor and verve, so much so that you and your exclamation pointed sentences must interject yourselves into a conversation before you burst.

These three groupings don’t cause many problems.

Most people fall into the declarative, simply offering observations as information without major amounts of bias or slant. Life doesn’t hold too many unanswered questions or unexpected surprises in the day-to-day, so the no-nonsense, no-frills period-ended sentence is enough to suffice.

However, there’s one other category of sentence users, one I often mind myself drifting into, that’s a sorry state of being to be a resident of: the imperial imperatives.

These are your command sentence users, the creators of statements which seem innocuous (and tend to end in a simple period like their kin the declarative), but actually contain some sort of missive, request, direction, order, instruction or outright demand.

They seem to infer the speaker must be a content-area expert on the subject to which they speak, even if evidence points directly to the contrary.

Every statement tends to come off as a judgment, handed down with a plonking certainty that is seldom taken seriously by anyone but the speaker. No one can be right all of the time, but this won’t stop those imperial imperatives from trying to maintain the illusion of intellectual dominance.

You’ll notice these people in conversations, as they can’t help but want to jump in in the middle of said conversations. You’ll see their eyes dart back and forth as other speakers are talking, as the cogs in their minds start to find a way to interject and take the conversational reins back for themselves.
Listening isn’t actually their goal; it’s just a byproduct of trying to maintain conversational control.

It’s a wonder other people are willing to put up with such nonsense.

Rather than try to impose your authoritative view on the world, perhaps a better way to go would be to drift back to the interrogative.

Question more than you answer.

Listen more than you speak.

Learn that every story from the person you are listening to does not require a spinoff personal anecdote from you that seldom has anything to do with the original topic.

Accentuate the interrogative. Eliminate the imperative. Latch on to the declarative ... and don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.