Arguably the most difficult, but perhaps the most powerful, lesson I teach is the lesson about clarifying a sentence. To clarify a single sentence, we list the actions it mentions, and we try to turn more of them into verbs. But why? How does a change differ from He changed x?
A vivid example of that difference appears in the American presidency today. President-Elect Barack Obama promised "change"--as a noun. Many Americans voted for "change" as a noun.
But when an action lives in a noun, each hearer of that noun supplies (or fails to supply) the doer of the change and the entities that are changed.
A few Americans assumed that Mr. Obama would change what they expected. Like presidents-elect before him, he would change the executive branch to a panel of his political supporters.
But Mr. Obama is changing something deeper. Already, in his political appointments, he is changing the way a president "runs" the executive branch. He is changing the presidency from an executive branch that answers "How can I implement my politics smoothly?" to an executive branch that answers "How can we best benefit America and the world?"
Change as a noun becomes change as a verb. Let's watch Mr. Obama and his very diverse team change the world.
