Revisiting the Subjunctive Mood: Great for Persuasion

A perhaps often overlooked technique that can help your writing gain some persuasiveness is the subjunctive mood. It’s possible that you remember the subjunctive less from your English classes than from your foreign languages classes—at least that’s the case for me. When learning to conjugate verbs in another language, you’ll often bump up against the subjunctive.

Verbs have moods. According to Patricia Osborn in How Grammar Works: A Self-Teaching Guide 182 (2d ed. 1999), mood “simply means the attitude of the speaker toward the words being spoken.” In English grammar, there are three moods: the indicative, the imperative, and the subjunctive. The indicative mood is the most common and indicates that the speaker is conveying meaning. For example, I look forward to warmer weather is written in the indicative mood. The verb to look is properly conjugated to match the subject, I. (Although my example is in the present tense, the indicative mood works in all verb tenses.) The imperative mood is for giving commands. For example, Hurry up! is imperative. Again, the verb to hurry is properly conjugated for the understood subject, you.

The subjunctive, by contrast, “uses an out-of-the-ordinary verb form to call attention to something extraordinary” (Osborn, 183). It is, as Osborn labels it in her text, “The [m]ood of [p]ossibilities.”

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Judge Brett Kavanaugh Calls for “Rules of the Road” for Separation of Powers Issues

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Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh

So Dez Bryant of the Dallas Cowboys leaps for a pass as the playoff game with the Green Bay Packers is about to end. He comes down with ball on the one-yard line. Or does he? Or course, you know the answer—he doesn’t, the referees rule, a call that is hotly debated nationwide (and helps the Packers to victory in the Jan. 11 NFL playoff game).

The referee’s call required making a decision on the spot under great pressure and scrutiny. But to Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit, a big reason the call was made in a way that stood up to later scrutiny was that the rules for deciding what was a legitimate catch were established ahead of time, with thought and clarity.

And that is, in substance, much of the message Kavanaugh delivered in the 2015 Hallows Lecture at Marquette University Law School on Tuesday. The lecture, titled “Separation of Powers Controversies in the Bush and Obama Administrations: A View from the Trenches,” examined five different policy areas where controversies over separation of powers at the top of the federal government have arisen in recent years. In all five areas, Kavanaugh said, it pays off when “the rules of the road” are developed before a crisis comes. 

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Wisconsin: The Final Firework in the Antislavery Legal Movement

Lemuel Shaw
Mass. Chief Justice
Lemuel Shaw

This is the fourth in a series of Schoone Fellowship Field Notes.

Putting Wisconsin’s antislavery heritage in perspective. Wisconsin takes great pride in its antislavery heritage, particularly the Northwest Ordinance (1787), which ensured that Wisconsin would be a free state, and the Booth Cases (1854, 1859), in which Wisconsin stood alone in defying the federal government’s attempt to turn northerners into slavecatchers. This pride is justified but needs perspective. When Wisconsin arrived on the American stage as a new state (1848), American slavery was two centuries old and the legal reaction against slavery had been underway for 70 years. The Booth Cases were important, but they were merely the final fireworks in the drama of American law and slavery.

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