on the x side

How to spot it

The test is one question, and it fits inside the sentence you are already reading: who drew that side?

Finding the shape is the easy half. A clause opens on the X side, a domain and a comma, and the subject turns up only after it. The domain can be whatever the writer feels like partitioning. The funding side. The staffing side. The paperwork side, sometimes stripped down and hyphenated into API-side. Linguists call a fronted phrase like that a frame setter, because it narrows everything after it to one restricted area, and it does the narrowing before the verb, which is why such a sentence can feel organised before you have learned who is acting in it.

So ask who drew the side. Often the answer comes back straight away, and dull in the best way. An office with a personnel department has a personnel side the way a house has a north wall, and the writer is pointing at something that existed before the sentence did. Often there is no answer at all. Nobody drew the engagement side, or the storytelling side, or the vibes side. Neither a glossary nor an organisation chart holds them, and the division the clause leans on was invented about half a second before it was leaned on.

If that leaves you unsure, cover the opener with a finger and hand the clause back its job. What remains either says who did what, in which case the frame was only framing, or it sits there as a state of affairs with nobody in it, in which case the frame quietly did the work a subject should have done.

Why models overdo it

Who drew the side is a question a model writing forward never asks. It is asking what tends to follow what, and a domain opener is one of the safest continuations available: grammatical almost anywhere, committed to nothing, and it postpones the hardest decision in an English sentence, which is naming the thing that acts.

It buys a voice as well. Someone who says on the read side and then on the write side usually sounds like a person who has worked inside a system with two named halves, because ordinarily only that person had reason to name them. That borrowed experience is what the opener sells. It is also exactly where the device breaks, since what it lends a sentence is genuine domain knowledge, and an invented domain has none to lend. A page that opens each new point on a freshly minted side is spending authority nobody issued.

The habit tends to arrive in clusters rather than singly. One such opener is ordinary variation, no more suspicious than any other fronted phrase. A run of them, every side different and every side new, is a writer announcing partitions faster than anyone could have drawn them.

When it's fine

If somebody drew the side first, the opener is sound.

Ari Fleischer, briefing reporters in 2001, turns from the day's business to nominations with "On the personnel side, the President intends to nominate Hilton Lewis Root". Personnel is not a coinage. It is a department, with a director and a process behind it, and the briefing really did have a personnel part and a policy part. The phrase does the job it was built for: it tells a room that the subject has changed, using a division everyone in the room already holds.

Hancock and Gowing open on the financial side in an official war history whose account is genuinely divided, so a reader who wants the other half can go and find it in the same volume. Marx writes on the German side about a war that had two of them in the most literal sense available. In all three the frame points outward at something a reader could check, and an invented side gives the reader nothing to check. The check for your own opener is whether a reader could name the other side without your help; when they could not, a plain subject serves them better.

Where it comes from

Grammarians file the move under topicalization: pulling a phrase that would ordinarily sit later, a place or a condition, up to the front, ahead of the subject. Circumstantial phrases are what English fronts most freely, long before a writer would shift a full argument out of its usual slot. Wallace Chafe named the particular job this kind of phrase does, which is to limit the applicability of the sentence that follows to one restricted domain, and Manfred Krifka's later work on information structure kept both the insight and the label, frame setter, illustrating it with one clause framed for Germany and a second framed for America.

The specific dress, on the X side, comes from somewhere older and plainer: a habit of taking up a divided subject one part at a time, which is what Marx is doing in 1870 and what an official war history is doing in 1949, wherever a writer needed to handle one half of an account without renaming it every sentence. Computing supplied the other half of the fusion, and later than the borrowed authority makes it sound. The researchers who worked out the client and server split on ARPANET did not use those words for the two ends; they wrote server-host and user-host. One of the earliest uses of client in computing prose sits in a 1978 Xerox PARC paper on distributed file systems, and server took another decade and more to enter general parlance. Put an old partition together with borrowed jargon and the result sounds like shop talk, which by the time both halves existed is precisely what it was.