cataphora

How to spot it

Cross out the number and read what is left. That test costs about as much time as reading the sentence did in the first place. A count announced ahead of its list is cataphora: the number points forward at items that have not arrived, so the sentence cannot stand on its own until they arrive. Finding one is easy. Judging it is where your attention belongs.

So cover the number and read the items alone. Ask what each one is doing that its neighbours are not. If two of them could be merged and nothing would be lost, or if a third could be struck out and no reader would notice the paragraph had shortened, then the number came first and the list was built to fill it. If each item does work the others cannot do, the count is a real map, and you are better off holding it.

A quieter signal sits underneath. A writer who counted honestly usually knows which item matters most and says so, often by putting it last and leaning on it. A count chosen in advance tends to hand over its items at the same weight and in no particular order, because nothing in the material chose them. Most readers feel that flatness a sentence or so before they can name it.

Why models overdo it

Word-by-word drafting asks what usually follows, and after an opening like "There are" a small number is among the likeliest things in the language. The count costs nothing at the moment it is written. What it does is commit the paragraph to a shape before the paragraph holds any material, and the material then has to be stretched or trimmed to fit the shape.

That is the difference worth keeping hold of. A person who writes "four reasons" has usually already found four reasons and is reporting the result of work that is finished. Nothing in a model's drafting runs that way round. The number is produced first, at the front of the sentence, and every item after it arrives under pressure to make that number true. Where a writer might have stopped at two, a draft rounds up to the familiar three, because three is what that opening usually carries.

It is cheap insurance, too. A stated count makes a paragraph look surveyed and sorted before a reader has read a word of it, and the appearance holds even when the items underneath are thin. That is why the habit runs so heavily through drafts that are trying to sound authoritative: the count performs the work of authority without paying any of its cost.

When it's fine

Most of the time it is fine, and a reader who distrusts every count has traded one bad habit for a worse one. A few paragraphs into Federalist No. 10, Madison writes that there are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction, and he is done with the first within two paragraphs: removing the causes would mean destroying liberty, a remedy he calls worse than the disease, or giving every citizen the same opinions, which he calls impracticable. Almost the whole essay then goes to the second method. That is not a broken promise. The count put both methods on the table so a reader could watch one of them fail, and striking the loser out of the sentence would have left the survivor looking like the only idea anybody ever had.

Marx and Engels settle the debt faster still. Partway into the first chapter of the Manifesto they write that society is splitting into two great hostile camps, and they name both camps inside that same sentence: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. Nothing is held back, so nothing can be left unpaid, and the chapters that follow are the work of telling the two apart.

Paul Graham gives the plainest modern case when he writes that there are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. He is not dressing the paragraph. He found two, he is about to hand you both, and the count tells you how long to hold your attention open. That is the job the device was built for.

So the honest question is never whether a sentence carries a count. It is whether anybody counted. A count you can defend item by item, where striking one out would cost the argument something real, has earned its place. Without that defence, cut back to the plain sentence, and the paragraph will usually read better for losing scaffolding it was never standing on.

Where it comes from

The Greek root of the forward-pointing half joins kata, meaning down or against, to pherein, to carry. Cataphora is the carrying forward of a reference to something the sentence has not said yet. Its mirror image, anaphora in the grammarian's sense, carries a reference back to something already named. English leans on both constantly and almost invisibly, usually through pronouns, and nobody minds. "Before she left, Ana locked the shed" is cataphora in its commonest form: the pronoun comes first and means nothing until the name arrives to fill it in.

The larger move, announcing how many parts an argument will have before starting it, is older and belongs to oratory rather than grammar. Roman handbooks made it a named stage in the building of a speech, the partitio, sitting between the statement of facts and the proof. Quintilian defended it on practical ground: a listener cannot turn back a page, so the only way to make a structure audible is to say its shape aloud before you build it. Aristotle had counted before him: in the first book of the Rhetoric he states that there are three modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word, and the treatise then takes them one at a time.

From there it went everywhere a person had to hold a room. Sermons were built on numbered heads, and preachers were taught to announce them from the pulpit before the first one arrived. Pamphlets and almanacs borrowed the habit because a reader skimming a page wants to know what he is in for. Closing arguments still run on it, and so do the better technical manuals. The device survived because it solves a genuine problem in a listener's memory, handing each item a slot to land in before it lands. Which is worth remembering, because the fault in a model's version is never the count itself. It is that nobody did the counting.