Writing is 15% word choice and 85% structure.

– George Gopen, Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Rhetoric, Duke University

 

Good writing isn’t just a matter of choosing the right words, important as that is. Good writing means choosing the right order for your words.

Writers often use word order to place extra emphasis on the most important content in a sentence. Three of the most useful sentence constructions for adding emphasis are the passive voice, the it-shift, and the what-shift: ^[1]

Standard form:	They turned the electricity off.	Passive voice:	The electricity was turned off.
Standard form:	We heard the neighbor’s dog barking.	It-shift:	It was the neighbor’s dog we heard barking.
Standard form:	I want ice cream.	What-shift:	What I want is ice cream.

 All three can be used to place extra emphasis on the most important content in a sentence.

 

Using passive voice for emphasis

Consider the following sentence, written in active voice, which places Germany in the stress position at the end of the sentence:

The British, French, Americans, and Russians occupied _{[ACTIVE VOICE]} Germany.

If you want to stress the sheer number of occupying countries—four all told—the passive is a good choice: 

Germany was occupied _{[PASSIVE VOICE]} by the British, French, Americans, and Russians.

 

Using the "it-shift" for emphasis

The "it-shift" gives you another means of stressing the fact that Germany was occupied by no less than four countries:

It was the British, French, Americans, and Russians who occupied Germany.

Sentences of the form "It was X that did Y" emphasize the content in the X position:

We heard the neighbor’s dog barking.

It was the neighbor's dog we heard barking. (Extra stress on
"the neighbor’s dog")

 

Using the what-shift for emphasis

What-shifts are another option for adding emphasis:

The Russians engineered a remarkable expansion of their military forces.

Versus:

What the Russians engineered was a remarkable expansion of their military forces.

Both sentences place "a remarkable expansion of their military forces" in the stress position at the end of the sentence, but the "what-shift" adds extra emphasis.

 

[1] The usual terms for it- and what-shifts are it-cleft and wh-cleft. We’ve followed Joseph Williams in using "it-shift" and "what-shift" because in both sentence types the original subject has been shifted to the right.