Stressing Out: Using It-Clefts for Argumentative Emphasis

“No,” said the park ranger. “It was the bear she always loved.”

Human beings are emphasis-seeking creatures. It’s seldom enough for us to simply make a point, especially in this era of widespread self-importance. No! More often than not, we must really freakin’ make our points, and so we marshal our full range of mannerisms, intonation, and language to carry the day.

On the page, however, intonation and mannerisms can leave us wanting. But fear not: We can always pull from a weather-beaten shed of text-based tools, like intensifiers, punctuation, redundancies, passive constructions, inversions, rhetorical devices, and cleft sentences. In this post, we’re going to explore that last little hammer, with the it-cleft as our particular focus.

A What Sentence?

First, let’s define cleft sentences more broadly. Simply put, a cleft sentence takes an idea you could get across in one clause and recasts it in multiple clauses. In grammar parlance, it often turns—or cleaves—a simple sentence (one independent clause) into a complex sentence (an independent clause and at least one dependent clause). In the cleaving, you move certain elements to the front, making them pop.

While our discussion will remain on the sentence level, the technique actually takes place on the level of the clause, meaning it can appear in more elaborate sentence structures.

Cleft sentences fall into two broad categories: the it-cleft and the wh-cleft. The former uses “it” plus a conjugation of “to be” to bring the target word or phrase to the front, with the dependent clause trailing, like this: “It was on Tuesday that he churned the butter.”

Wh-clefts, meanwhile, use “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” or “why” to kick off the new construction. Making things messier still, you can also use words like “all” or “how” to start a wh-cleft.

In the whistling cavern of my skull, I clip the first syllable of “hyphen,” mash it into “wh,” and end up calling these guys “Wyclefs.” I encourage you to do the same, but actually, if you dig deeper, you’ll see that most learned folks call them “pseudo-clefts.” That’s because they don’t start with an independent clause like an it-cleft but rather with a dependent clause that functions as a noun phrase—a pseud, basically.

As you can see, getting your head around Wyclefs is a nightmare on Elm Street, so we’re not going to bother with them here, but you’ve probably seen them in constructions like this: “What really stressed me out was reading that paragraph.”

There are all kinds of reasons to use both types, from expressing emotion and building suspense to clarifying old information or correcting misinformation. In the cartoon that accompanies this post, I used one to be silly.

Because they’re such a sprawling subject, we’re going to look only at it-clefts that stress or correct information in a debate. This is one of the more basic uses, and once you can parse a cleft sentence in this context, the staggering array of variations will be easier to recognize and understand.

Jamming on an It-Cleft

Example time. Let’s start with the so-called simple sentence. One of English’s four main sentence types, it comprises just one independent clause—that is, only one subject and at least one verb, and you might see a lot of other stuff in there too, like adverbs, adjectives, and other parts of speech. Here’s the riff we’ll be jamming on:

The prime minister changed his position on the war several times throughout the week.

Here, “the prime minister” is our subject. We’ve only got one verb, and that’s “changed.” The verb has an object, which is “his position.” The object is modified by the adjectival prepositional phrase “on the war,” and the verb is modified by two adverbials: “several times” and “throughout the week.”

Simple, right? Nah, not really. Obviously, “simple” can be a misnomer, but this sentence is categorized that way because, despite all those constituents, it comprises just one independent clause.

To make an it-cleft, we need to chop out one of those constituents and move it to the front of an independent clause that starts with “it” and “was.” In so doing, we prod the remaining information into a dependent clause. This gruesome task creates another of the four sentence types: the complex sentence, so called because it comprises an independent clause and at least one dependent clause. Here, the nomenclature is a little more apt.

We have a few options when it comes to which constituent we can move, but the structure will stay the same, so let’s start by emphasizing “the prime minister”:

It was the prime minister who changed his position on the war several times throughout the week.

Our newly cleaved independent clause is “it was the prime minister,” which we’d use if we were emphatically correcting some fool who tried to hang the waffling position on, say, the defence minister. In this scenario, we’re the defence minister’s mom, and it’s not enough to use a simple sentence, not when someone talks smack about our kid.

We put the remaining information in the dependent clause that makes up the other half of our cleft. In this case, we’re seeing a relative clause, which is one of the three main dependent clauses, this one using the relative pronoun “who” as both a subordinating conjunction (necessary to hinge the clauses together) and a grammatical subject (necessary for the verb to make sense).

But what if we’re not the defence minister’s mom, and actually, we want to emphasize some other aspect of the original simple sentence? Again, using only it-clefts, we can stress anything but “changed.” We can highlight “his position,” “on the war,” “several times,” or “throughout the week.” It all depends on the information we want to stress or correct.

It was his position that the prime minister changed on the war several times throughout the week.

Here, maybe some fool was insisting it was government policy that the prime minister changed, whereas we know he hadn’t consulted with his caucus. This is another relative clause (it’s modifying the noun that came before it), but unlike the first one, it uses “that” to fire itself up, which isn’t a relative pronoun in this context—although it sometimes can be. Basically, “that” is a slippery little jerk of a word that can play different roles in different clauses. In this example, it’s more of a subordinating conjunction (actually, it’s increasingly referred to as a "complementizer" in this context), and to perform that role, it can even be invisible. If you check out the sentence again, you’ll see it works fine without “that” showing up at all, although there’d still be a conjunctive phantom dictating the structure.

But what if our fool was telling people the prime minister only changed his position once. Well, ha! We know otherwise! So we’d counter by emphasizing “several times” in the independent clause. If we did that, we’d need an adverbial dependent clause to carry the rest of the information, like this:

It was several times that the prime minister changed his position on the war.

From there, we could emphasize two other elements of the original simple sentence, depending on what our fools are trying to posit.

It was throughout the week that the prime minister changed his position on the war several times. [So not over the weekend; he was too busy counting his money.]

It was on the war that the prime minister changed his position several times throughout the week. [So not on his investments; he gets mad when he’s asked about those.]

The last thing to note is that all of these sentences work in both the negative and interrogative, like this:

It wasn’t even several times that the prime minister changed his position on the war throughout the week.

Was it several times that the prime minister changed his position on the war throughout the week?

Applying It-Clefts

Although clefts are most common in writing, we do use them when we’re talking, often in blissful ignorance. That’s just our emphasis-seeking imperative having its way with our speech, usually when we’re arguing with someone in a bar. In writing, the context doesn’t have to be so adversarial.

You could use an it-cleft in the abstract of an academic article if your findings counter a recent publication: “It was artificial intelligence that misled the authors.”

You could use one to open an opinion piece if you were contesting a cultural norm: “Far from bringing people together, it’s nationalism that causes so many of our divisions.”

Or you could use one to correct information in an email exchange: “Actually, it was a weekend when he booked the flights.”

With those last two, you’ll notice I added some elements to the front of the sentences, and in the wild, you’ll often see them that way, so it’s good to start training your eye.

Once you learn to recognize it-clefts used to correct or stress information, you’ll be able to deliberately incorporate them into your own writing. From there you can start experimenting with other it-cleft functions and, when you’re ready, with Wyclefs too. But no matter how good you get, always use cleft sentences with restraint. They’re a hammer, and really, hardly anything is a nail.