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Monday It was the first sentence that ruined the whole feature . The reporting was strong . The interviews were vivid . The subject — a town rebuilding its library after a flood — had emotional weight without needing exaggeration . But the opening paragraph tried to introduce the disaster , the building , the mayor , the volunteers , the insurance dispute , and the historical significance of the library in six lines . By the time I reached the second paragraph , I had forgotten what the story wanted me to notice . I cut the opening to three sentences . Then I tried an it - cleft : " It was the children's room that reopened first . " That sentence changed the centre of gravity . The neutral version was : " The children's room reopened first . " Perfectly correct . But the cleft version answered an implicit question : which part of the library mattered first in the story ? An it - cleft divides a message into a focused element and a relative clause : It was + focus + that / who + clause " It was the children's room that reopened first . " The focus is " the children's room . " The rest of the clause identifies the proposition in which that element is contrastively important . The construction did not make the sentence more informative . It made the information hierarchy clearer . I kept it . Tuesday It was not the first draft that caused trouble but the second . The feature was about a chef closing a famous restaurant after thirty years . The writer had begun with a long description of the kitchen : " The copper pans reflected the early light . Steam rose from a stockpot . On the wall hung photographs of visiting actors , politicians , and footballers . " Atmospheric , but predictable . The real story appeared halfway down the page : " The chef had decided to close because his daughter did not want to inherit the restaurant . " I moved that tension upward . " It was his daughter's refusal to take over the restaurant that finally made Alain Morel close it . " My colleague Eva objected . " Too dramatic . " " True ? " " Yes . " " Accurate emphasis ? " " Also yes . " The question was therefore not grammar but tone . It - clefts are naturally contrastive . They imply that the focused element matters more than competing explanations . Compare : " Rising costs made him close the restaurant . " " It was rising costs that made him close the restaurant . " The second sounds as though the writer is correcting another account . That implied correction can be useful : " It wasn't rising costs that ended the restaurant ; it was the fact that no one in the family wanted to continue it . " Now the contrast is explicit and justified . Without that contrast , however , the cleft may sound as if the writer is manufacturing drama . We revised the opening : " For years , customers assumed rising costs would eventually close Alain Morel's restaurant . They were wrong . It was his daughter's decision not to inherit it that finally ended the thirty - year business . " Now the cleft answered a real misconception established by the previous sentence . I wrote a note to myself : A cleft should focus something the context gives the reader a reason to focus .
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