Paragraph Technique: The Two-Line Reverse

What follows is the opening paragraph from “The Debt Economy,” an article written by James Surowiecki that appeared in the November 23, 2009 issue of the New Yorker:

John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that all financial crises are the results of “debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale.” The recent financial crisis was no exception, with everyone — homeowners, private-equity investors, our biggest banks — taking on enormous amounts of debt. If it’s frustrating that the government is footing the bill to clean up the mess, it’s even worse that the government helped pay for the debt binge that created the mess in the first place, thanks to a tax system that actually subsidizes borrowing. Debt didn’t get dangerously out of scale because the system was broken. It got out of scale, in part, because the system worked.

Let’s narrow in a little further:

Debt didn’t get dangerously out of scale because the system was broken. It got out of scale, in part, because the system worked.

Try reading these two lines out loud.

Notice how in the first sentence your voice travels downhill to the word broken. Then, in the second line, it travels back up to end (brightly in tone, but ominous in meaning) on the word worked.

I think this is very nice. You could argue that it’s a little mechanical, but you also have to agree that it’s an effective way of erasing one set of expectations and replacing them with another. (Which is what Surowiecki needs to do in order to advance his argument.)

Like any technique the two-line reverse can be used for ill:

He left the house that fine spring morning never having felt more alive. What he didn’t know — nay, what he couldn’t know — was that this was the day he would die.

But it can also be used (slightly) more subtly.

Imagine a paragraph about a guy arriving late to deliver a big speech at an important auditorium. He hurries through the stage door. Minions scurry to get the proceedings started. He checks his breath. Wipes the sweat off his palms. He gets to the wings just as the person introducing him gets something in his bio wrong. Then this:

He takes the stage expecting to see an audience filled with hundreds of people. Instead there is one.

The “two-line reverse” gets you out of the droning quality of early drafts, where the sentences come one after another with little relationship to each other. Try it the next time you want your work to have a little more music.