Spending the time to get our syntax just right

Here is a paragraph from today's Washington Post, from a commentary by Robert Kagan:

We live history forward, in the chaos of onrushing events, without a clear guide. But we judge history backward, smugly armed with the knowledge of what did happen and uninterested in what might have happened. This partly explains the oscillation of U.S. foreign policy over the decades between periods of high involvement overseas and periods of withdrawal and retrenchment. In the case of World War I, the recoiling from what came to be regarded as the great error of intervention led to two decades in which Americans so removed themselves from involvement in Europe and East Asia that they unwittingly helped bring about the next great war they would once again be dragged into fighting. One wonders whether this pattern will eventually repeat itself in Afghanistan.

It is not the lead to the story, but it function as something often referred to as the "nut graf," or key theme or statistic or timely motivator, of a news story. The nut graf is where we answer the essential reader question: "Why am I reading this right now?"

The above paragraph alludes to the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, which horrified Americans enough to eventually bring the U.S. into WWI. 

I was struck by the use of "oscillation" as opposed to something like "changing positions" and how that simple diction choice tells a lot about who the writer was imagining reading the article. Oscillation is not an incredibly demanding vocabulary word, and it works perfectly here, indicating movement between two stated policies. 

Our diction choices are about finding just the right word or phrase, of course, but also indicate expectations of our audience. I once argued that including some slightly challenging diction in newspapers and magazines might be considered as opportunities to raise the level of discourse.

Now I wonder about that. Survey after survey point out that many Americans truly despise mainstream media, and I will guess that one reason is writers choosing a somewhat higher level of diction. Perhaps not the main reason, but Americans have always distrusted the educated, the experts, the "elite." There are some good reasons for this mistrust. I just wish needing to look up something on Dictionary.com were not part of the problem.

What I most admired about the paragraph, however, was the way the first two sentences illustrate "oscillation" as a term. Word meaning derived from context is one of our most common ways to puzzle out a word.

Note the parallelism of "we live history forward..." and "we judge history backward," with the clear balance of the phrases and the clear establishment of two situations. When we examine parallelism we are concerned with syntax, or the arrangement of our word choices.

The paragraph would lose its rhetorical power had the writer chosen something like, "when judging history, however, we look backward..." 

The meaning would be the same. The power would be gone.