Building Great Sentences (14 page)

Or here's one I wrote:

Thomas Berger remains one of America's most celebrated underread authors, a writer whose books enjoy rave reviews, but whose sales and numbers rarely rise above respectable, possibly because his fiction consistently resists the twin sentimentalities of idealism and despair.

Linguistic theory tells us that the last or the next-to-last step or slot in the sentence generally is the place in the sentence where we want to put the most intonational stress. As Martha Kolln explains in her book
Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects
, in the chapter on sentence rhythm, this well-recognized rhythm pattern is called end focus, and it gives rhythmic emphasis to information at or near the end of the sentence. Professor Strunk had already intuited this principle in 1919 and included it as his twenty-second and final “Principle of Composition” in his “little book”: “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.”

I have mixed feelings about this advice, particularly when it is used to make the claim that periodic or suspensive sentences are somehow superior to loose or right-branching cumulative sentences. The truth is, we can shape our sentences so as to emphasize any part of them we want to, and that emphasis is rhetorical rather than grammatical, determined by the context and purpose of the sentence rather than by its grammatical form. To his great credit, Professor Strunk acknowledged that truth by qualifying his “end-of-sentence” advice, explaining, “The proper place in the sentence for the word or group of words that the writer desires to make most prominent is
usually
the end” (emphasis mine). Moreover, shortly thereafter he adds: “The
other
prominent position in the sentence is the
beginning
” (emphasis mine again). Position by itself may or may not place emphasis, but the end position does generally tend to lend itself to emphasis.

Using Final Cumulative Phrases to Sum Things Up

And that's why, in discussing figurative language, I suggested the advantages of using the final step of a cumulative sentence for a summative simile or a simile that recasts previous information in more dramatic and memorable form. That's why I'm now suggesting the advantages of using the final step of a cumulative sentence for speculation about motive or likely consequences or cause, speculation signaled by the word
because
,
possibly
, or
perhaps
. Of these heuristic prompts,
because
sounds a lot more certain than
possibly
and
perhaps
, and
because
is a subordinating conjunction, almost always introducing a subordinate clause rather than a modifying phrase. I group these words together because they serve very similar informational functions and they so frequently appear in combination.

We can see how they work in combination in sentences such as “The guard fainted, dropping his rifle, crumpling at the feet of the queen, perhaps because he had been standing in the blazing sun for hours” and “We all dropped the class, possibly because we couldn't see how it would help us make our fortunes, possibly because the instructor spoke very rapidly in a shrill, high voice, possibly because we were not convinced of the value of deconstructing old episodes of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, or possibly because it met at 7:30 in the morning.”

Of course, the cumulative syntax also invites the placement of speculative phrases in the initial or medial slots of the sentence, but as has been my practice so far, I've focused on the final slot simply to take full advantage of the generative power of the cumulative, its final modifying phrase always reminding us of the option of coming up with a simile or speculation that might provide a new perspective or offering a summation of what has gone before in the sentence, both options also giving us a chance to reveal more of the way we process information in our writing.

Nor do the heuristic prompts I've singled out exhaust the possibilities for introducing such speculation.
For
and
as
can be used interchangeably with
because
:

He knew that calling for help was useless, a waste of breath, because no one lived for miles around.

He knew that calling for help was useless, a waste of breath, for no one lived for miles around.

He knew that calling for help was useless, a waste of breath, as no one lived for miles around.

None of these variations is a cumulative phrase in a strict grammatical sense, but if the clauses introduced by
because
or by causal uses of
for
or
as
come to us at the end of phrases that have established the cumulative rhythm, they work cumulatively, plugging into the rhetorical advantages and opportunities cumulative syntax offers us. I'm also not sure that any significant difference exists among these three sentences, but I suspect each of us gravitates toward one of these options more than the other two, and I further suspect we do so because we sense at least connotative differences among the three.
As
in place of
because
sounds a tad smug to me. “She didn't come to the party, as we had not invited her.” As a matter of fact,
as
is a word with as many different uses as to stun those of us who don't think systematically, perhaps obsessively, about language. Fowler's
Modern English Usage
identifies a whopping thirteen different ways or senses in which the word
as
can be used. I mention this only because it is from little choices, such as those concerning our choice between
as
and
for
, that we build individual writing styles, and as much as possible, I'd like my own writing style to be the result of choices that I can, if need be, explain, even though those choices have become so habitual or so natural for me that I certainly am no longer conscious of them when I write.

Write What You Think, as Well as What You Know, but Be Sure to Signal Your Reader When You Move from Report to Speculation

Nor, of course, are
possibly
and
perhaps
the only words we can use to signal speculation.
Maybe
would serve the same purpose, or we might choose
probably
to signal a greater degree of confidence in our speculation. Should we wish to move beyond speculation to offer an explanation that puts distance between our thinking and apparent or received truth, we might wish to introduce our summative cumulative modifying phrase with a word such as
likely
, a phrase such as
more likely
, or a word as insistent as
actually
. Here are examples:

The guard fainted, dropping his rifle, crumpling at the feet of the queen, likely a casualty of poor training and poor conditioning.

The guard fainted, dropping his rifle, crumpling at the feet of the queen, more likely a sign of his nervousness than of exhaustion.

The guard fainted, dropping his rifle, crumpling at the feet of the queen, actually reinforcing the view widely held by the press that these ceremonial inspections were pointless.

And, of course, the verbs most frequently associated with the kind of writerly speculation I'm advocating are
seem
and
appear
, the verbal participial forms of both
seeming
and
appearing
, custom-made for introducing speculative cumulative modifying phrases. Here's an example:

Each essay explored another of the writer's fears, seeming to reveal an almost infinite number of pathologies, each appearing more threatening than the last.

Another example:

She built her business slowly, opening a new store only when its success was certain, seemingly incapable of miscalculations when assessing likely profits.

Or another:

The young novelist produced bestseller after bestseller, appearing to have stumbled on the magic formula for literary success.

I've only begun to skim the surface of ways in which we can foreground ourselves in our writing as thinkers, as information processors. There are an almost infinite number of ways we can call attention to ourselves as the consciousness behind what we write. We can use verbs of intellectual agency:
I think
,
I believe
,
I know
, or
it seems to me
. We can use phrases that self-consciously foreground our thinking, such as
in my opinion
or
the way I see it
.

There are other ways, probably beyond counting, and certainly beyond systematic study, to accomplish this important goal. For instance, listen to the way E. B. White makes his opinion very clear about the ethics of mining companies in this sentence from his essay “Letter from the East”: “The mining company soon milked the place dry of copper and zinc and got out, the way mining companies do.” If his choice of “milked” as a verb didn't establish his view of mining companies, the final cumulative modifying phrase “the way mining companies do” makes his disdain unmistakable. I'm betting that each of us could come up with quite a list of ways in which we can signal in our writing the individuality of our thinking. What's more, I bet our lists would be quite different, yet another tribute to the diversity and multiplicity of language.

Perhaps I should acknowledge once again that my approach to teaching writing does value very highly the ethos aspect of rhetorical situations, in part because those other two classic components of rhetoric, logos and pathos, strike me as much more beyond the effective reach of writing instruction since they are always so context dependent. We may not be able to anticipate the logical or emotional context in which we must write, but we do always bring the same creative consciousness to the process of writing. We can always remember, as Joan Didion put it, “what it was to be me,” or what it means to be me, and how we want to communicate to our readers our personality, our individuality, as the creative mind behind what we write.

Next Steps

If you've been trying your hand at even a few of the Next Steps exercises, you've written quite a few cumulative sentences. Select a few of your favorites and see if they suggest a place or places where you might add a cumulative modifying phrase that contains a simile introduced by
as if
or
as though
. Select a few other cumulative sentences you've crafted and see if you can add a final cumulative modifying phrase that offers your speculation about something you've written in the sentence or that offers a kind of overview or summation of the propositions advanced by the sentence.

The Riddle of Prose Rhythm

I
'm really fond of the old Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein song that goes “I can't dance, don't ask me.” Only, as I suspect a number of you may already be thinking, that isn't exactly the way the song goes. The title of the song is “I Won't Dance,” and the lyrics go “I
won't
dance, don't ask me.” I'm not sure when I confused the lyrics or how I managed to remember “can't dance” from a showstopping song and dance number performed by Fred Astaire, who—somewhat famously—
could
dance. Of course, it may be that my misremembering dates not from watching Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the 1935 musical
Roberta
but instead from the equally memorable performance by Kermit and Miss Piggy in an episode of
The Muppet Show
. And, after all, some confusion may be understandable here, since it seems that the original lyrics for the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein version of “I Won't Dance” were completely rewritten by the songwriting team of Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, and it's their lyrics we remember—or in my case misremember—today.

And, indeed, even though it is Fred Astaire who sang the song in
Roberta
—while spectacularly dancing—the lyrics do at least hint at problems with dancing, including, “I won't dance, why should I? / I won't dance, how could I?”

If you're wondering why I've suddenly gone all musical-trivia on you, there is a reason. You see, I can't dance. I have absolutely no sense of rhythm. Sure, I can shuffle around enough to fake it for a minute or two at weddings, bat mitzvahs, anniversary celebrations, and the like, but I simply can't dance. And, to judge from the anguished admissions I kept coming across on the Internet when I was trying to track down the song whose lyrics I so tellingly misremembered, I'm not alone. The number of my fellow sufferers, all of us rhythmically challenged, is legion! Moreover, I was grateful to discover that I am far from alone in misremembering “I won't dance” as “I can't dance.” Indeed, many of the references to this song on the Web make that very same mistake.

Even Writers with Two Left Feet Can Master Prose Rhythm

But here's the funny thing: while my sense of rhythm is pretty close to hopeless when it comes to dancing—or even to clapping in time with music—I feel I have a very good ear for rhythm in prose. I recognize it even when reading silently, I feel comfortable invoking it when I read prose aloud, and I can be equally hypnotized by the gentle and carefully crafted rhythms of prose written by Virginia Woolf or the sometimes manically varied prose rhythms found in the fiction of Thomas Berger.

Listen to this justly celebrated, exquisitely measured passage from Virginia Woolf's
Mrs. Dalloway
:

Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.

And here are two very different-sounding sentences from two of Thomas Berger's novels. The first is from his classic
Little Big Man
and is in the inimitable voice of Jack Crabb:

As I say, none of us understood the situation, but me and Caroline was considerably better off than the chief, because we only looked to him for our upkeep in the foreseeable future, whereas he at last decided we was demons and only waiting for dark to steal the wits from his head; and while riding along he muttered prayers and incantations to bring us bad medicine, but so ran his luck that he never saw any of the animal brothers that assisted his magic—such as Rattlesnake or Prairie Dog—but rather only Jackrabbit, who had a grudge against him of long standing because he once had kept a prairie fire off his camp by exhorting it to burn the hares' home instead.

The second example is from Berger's retelling of the “matter of Britain” in his
Arthur Rex
and sounds more than a bit like Sir Thomas Malory—but like a Malory who has just mastered the cumulative sentence:

Now the abominable Sir Meliagrant took Guinevere to a kingdom that was not very distant from Britain but was cunningly concealed, tucked into a valley amongst mountains, entrance to which could be gained only by one pass not easily found, and before this pass was a rushing river over which was but one bridge, the narrowest in the world, for it was made of one long sword, the weapon of a giant, the which was mounted horizontally, keen edge upwards.

I've chosen these particular passages to share with you to suggest the range of prose rhythms we can hear in Woolf's finely architected prose, Berger's mastery of American vernacular prose rhythms, and Berger's ability to invoke the sound of Sir Thomas Malory's prose, but in a book whose prose is also thoroughgoingly modern. Notice that these passages are rhythmical, but not musical or even metrical—the result of the way each proceeds forward in steps rather than the result of syllable count or meter. As Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us in her delightful writing text,
Steering the Craft
, “The sound of language is where it all begins and what it all comes back to. The basic elements of language are physical; the noise words make and the rhythm of their relationships. This is just as true of written prose as it is of poetry.”

Or as Virginia Woolf so perfectly puts it in her 1926 letter to V. Sackville-West, which Le Guin cites:

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. . . . Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

My writing students may at first roll their eyes when I tell them that a sentence they've written needs an extra beat or needs to be slowed down or speeded up, but they almost always agree with me once we start working on the sentence. And once I get them thinking about prose rhythm, they admit that not only does this thinking help them improve their own writing, but it also makes their reading more enjoyable, as they start finding delight in writers at the level of the sentence that may help them understand why they are attracted to a writer's “larger” characteristics such as plot or theme or character.

What's funny about this seeming contradiction—no sense of rhythm when it comes to dancing, pretty good ear for rhythm when it comes to prose—is that the topic of prose rhythm is tremendously more complicated and tremendously less understood, much less agreed upon, than the topic of rhythm in dance or music or even poetry. Questions about the nature of prose rhythm are even peskier than questions about the nature of prose style, and of course, there's every reason to suspect that prose rhythm plays a very important role in determining prose style.

What We Mean—and Don't Mean—When We Refer to Prose Rhythm

Accordingly, let's spend a few minutes thinking about the oh-so-important but oh-so-unsettled topic of prose rhythm. It's too important for me not to mention it, too complicated and conflicted for me to do much more than suggest some of the complexities. So I'm going to give a very brief overview of the history of attempts to study, measure, explain, or theorize prose rhythm. I'm going to offer a couple of ways of thinking about the importance of prose rhythm. And finally, I'm going to offer a very modest way of thinking about prose rhythm in the cumulative sentences we've been working with, including a very, very modest model for describing the rhythms of some cumulative sentences.

As is frequently the case with matters pertaining to rhetoric and poetics, Aristotle seems to have been one of the earliest to weigh in on the topic of prose rhythm. He laid down a kind of “golden mean” law, prescribing that “prose should not be metrical, nor should it be without rhythm.” As he explained this dictum, “Metrical prose is unconvincing because it betrays artifice” and also because it “distracts the hearer who is led to look for the recurrence of a similar metrical pattern.” Once prose becomes metrical, it becomes predictable, Aristotle argued, leading even children to anticipate what will come next in highly metrical prose.

So far, so good. Most of us would agree with his reasoning today, even though our attitude toward artifice in language, our understanding of the range of metrical patterns, and our sense of prose rhythms are all almost certainly quite different from those held by Aristotle. It's what he said next that still proves problematic: “Prose without rhythm is formless, and it should have form, but not meter. The indefinite and formless is displeasing and cannot be known. . . . Prose then must have a rhythm but not meter, for if it has meter it will be a poem.” The problem is that after saying prose rhythm should not be metrical, Aristotle then goes on to discuss prose rhythms in exclusively metrical terms, just as if he were discussing poetry, referring to the “heroic” rhythm driven by dactyls and spondees, the “conversational” rhythm built into the iambic foot, and then the paeon with its parts in a ratio of two to three—none of which I'm going to try to explain, because it is all hopeless hooey. First of all, there's a significant disconnect when we try to transfer Aristotle's pronouncements about rhythms in Greek prose to rhythms in English prose; and second of all, prose rhythms are simply too diverse, too variable, too unpredictable to be treated metrically, at least in the same way that we analyze poetry in terms of feet and syllables, stressed and unstressed.

Yet the attempts throughout history to analyze prose rhythm are largely prone to doing just that—dividing prose passages into feet, marking accented and unaccented syllables, and identifying the meter revealed by the scan in exactly the way we identify the meter of poetry.

The Long and Troubled History of Attempts to Explain Prose Rhythm

Aristotle may have started us down this unproductive path, but it was British critic George Saintsbury who more than any other single authority doomed us to this approach with his 1912 magnum opus,
History of English Prose Rhythm
. Not only did Saintsbury largely follow Aristotle's lead, but he scoured the books for even more esoteric meters than those usually discussed in poetry and swelled the list of possible prose rhythms with impossibly arcane meters such as “amphibrach,” “molossus,” and “proceleusmatic.”

Saintsbury's efforts to describe English prose rhythms marked a period in the early decades of the twentieth century during which there appeared a veritable stampede of theories and studies of rhythm in general and prose rhythm in particular. Somewhat typical was Albert C. Clark's lecture “Prose Rhythm in English,” published by Oxford in 1913. Clark held:

For the origin of prose rhythm we must go to Cicero. Nature, he tells us, has placed in the ears a register which tells us if a rhythm is good or bad, just as by the same means we are enabled to distinguish notes in music. Men first observed that particular sounds gave pleasure to the ear, then they repeated them for this end. . . . The rhythm of prose is based on the same principle as that of verse. This in ancient prose was the distribution of long and short syllables; in our own tongue it is the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables.

A related attempt to describe prose rhythm in metrical terms was associated with Morris W. Croll, whose 1919 “The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose” and 1966 book
Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm
advocated identifying prose rhythms according to a typology of clause endings used in medieval Latin. To the Latin meters identified as
planus
,
tardus
,
velox
, and
trispondaic
, Croll added some new endings he thought he had discovered in English prose. Once again, I hope you'll understand why I'm not going to try to explain this system, beyond noting its almost desperate desire to tie contemporary English prose rhythms to the classification system used in an ancient language that was not English.

Even more desperate seeming is the longing in these attempts to find a way of describing prose as essentially regular in its rhythms, with one particular beat or meter predominating throughout a single piece of prose or the prose of a single writer—this notwithstanding the repeated unflattering references, from Aristotle to the present, to Greek audiences that found the rhythms of some Greek orators so predictable they could not resist beating time with the speaker, matching his cadence, “not apparently from any wish to ridicule him, but unable to resist the temptation and infection,” claimed Saintsbury. While classical commentators from Aristotle to Quintilian to Cicero seem to agree that “variety” should be at the heart of effective prose rhythm, those commentators seem hopelessly tied to the notion that “variety” should occur at some level higher than that of the sentence, whose feet must necessarily manifest some regular meter, after the manner of poetry. Of course, today much poetry no longer regularly manifests meter, which makes it even harder to understand the persistent efforts to describe prose rhythm in terms of poetic meter.

Apart from simply accepting and passing along the assumption that prose rhythm is essentially just a watered-down version of poetic rhythm, most early-twentieth-century efforts to describe rhythm in prose manage to agree that very little agreement exists in their enterprise. E. A. Sonnenschein began his 1925 study
What Is Rhythm?
with a somewhat discouraged observation: