Subordination occurs when the ideas in a sentence are of unequal importance. It is a common technique, and one can hardly read more than a few sentences of academic writing without encountering it. One example of subordination can be found in paragraph 15 of the essay "Work and Spend" written by Juliet Schor and printed in the Spring 2001 edition of  The Anteater Reader. The topic sentence of this paragraph says, "The consumerism that took root in the 1920s was premised on the idea of dissatisfaction." The sentence contains two clauses "consumerism was premised on the idea of dissatisfaction" and "that took root in the 1920s."  The clause "consumerism . . . dissatisfaction" is the main clause of the sentence because it contains the subject and principal verb of the sentence. The other clause, "that took root in the 1920s," acts as an adjective to modify "consumerism" and is said to be dependent because it cannot serve as a sentence by itself even though it contains a subject "that" and a verb "took."

Subordination can guide a reader's expectations. Because the issue of dissatisfaction occurs in the main clause of the topic sentence, we expect the paragraph to be about the psychology of consumerism. And it is. A different version of the sentence, one that places the when issue in the main clause, creates different expectations. With this version ("The consumerism that was premised on the idea of dissatisfaction took root in 1920s") we expect the paragraph to focus on consumerism's history. If you don't subordinate carefully, you run the risk of misguiding the reader.

Also, notice the choppy effect produced by putting the two ideas into separate sentences. Consider a two-sentence version: "Consumerism took root in the 1920s. It was premised on the idea of dissatisfaction." In this version the writer seems to ramble from one idea to the next, and the reader doesn't know what to expect from the paragraph.

In addition to showing the relative importance of ideas, other kinds of subordinating language can show relationships between ideas. Consider the following rewritten version of a sentence from paragraph 22 of Stephan Thernstrom's "Poverty and Progress" (The Anteater Reader, Spring 2001): "Although most of the social gains registered by laborers during these years were modest, in the laborer's eyes these gains loomed large." This sentence describes the thesis of Thernstrom's essay. The subordination, which is introduced by the subordinating conjunction "although," tells us that there is a relationship of contrast between what laborers had accomplished and what they thought about their accomplishments. Such subordinating language is often needed to convey complex issues.