Building Great Sentences (15 page)

The large number of works on metre and prosody published during recent years in Europe and America bear eloquent testimony to the existence of a world-wide interest in the problem of rhythm, and to a deep-seated dissatisfaction with the results hitherto arrived at by enquirers. For it is evident not only that there is no accepted theory of rhythm in the field, but that there is no common understanding among enquirers as to the very nature of the thing called “rhythm.”

Attempting to rectify this sad state of affairs, Professor Sonnenschein finally gets around to offering his own definition of rhythm: “Rhythm is that property of a sequence of events in time which produces on the mind of an observer the impression of proportion between the durations of the several events or groups of events of which the sequence is composed.”

Phew! I'm glad we cleared that up. But, as generally unhelpful as I find this—and most other—takes on rhythm, I'm going to return to Sonnenschein's definition in just a minute to consider one part I think he got very right—the part that locates the order or pattern or structure of rhythm not in the language of the speaker or writer but instead locates rhythm only as that which “produces
on the mind of an observer
the impression of order or proportion.”

I'm not a student of prosody, but as far as I can tell, Sonnenschein's description from 1925 pretty much describes the state of agreement—or disagreement—concerning prose rhythms that we still have today.

But not to worry! Remember that John Steinbeck quotation about spine counting? Metrical theories of prose rhythm strike me as the worst kind of spine counting. The good news is that they give us labels for metrical phenomena we can indeed find, on occasion, in prose; the bad news is that those labels tell us absolutely nothing about the way prose rhythm works—about the relational realities it establishes between writers and readers. Only slightly more productive are the related attempts to treat prose essentially as song lyrics and to describe it with musical time notations. Particularly for those of us who can't dance, this approach is not very promising, and while it may produce results for prose we widely recognize as “musical,” it has little or no descriptive power for the vast majority of prose we encounter.

Unfortunately, we don't fare a lot better when we move to the experiential end of the descriptive continuum, where descriptions of prose rhythm invoke the rhythms of nature and the rhythms of the Bible. The ninth edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
, the famous “Scholar's Edition” published between 1875 and 1889, has this to say about prose rhythm:

Perhaps it may be said that deeper than all the rhythms of art is that rhythm which art would fain catch, the rhythm of nature; for the rhythm of nature is the rhythm of life itself. This rhythm can be caught by prose as well as by poetry, such prose, for instance, as that of the English Bible. . . . Being rhythm, it is of course governed by law, but it is a law which transcends in subtlety the conscious art of the metricist, and is only caught by the poet in his most inspired moods, a law which, being part of nature's own sanctions, can of course never be formulated, but only expressed as it is expressed in the melody of the bird, in the inscrutable harmony of the entire bird-chorus of a thicket, in the whisper of the leaves of the tree, and in the song or wail of wind and sea . . .

I'm not sure what I gain when I trade in my metronome for the rhythms of birds and the wind and the sea, although I suspect it's a step in the right direction. And I've come across another step in the right direction of understanding prose rhythm in another early-twentieth-century study. I've been fascinated by the approach and findings of William Morrison Patterson's
The Rhythm of Prose: An Experimental Investigation of Individual Difference in the Sense of Rhythm
. Patterson was an English professor at Columbia, and his study, aided by the Columbia Department of Psychology, was published by Columbia University Press in 1917. His study was supplemented by “voice photographs” of the wave patterns made by recordings of subjects uttering certain words and phrases—including poet Amy Lowell reading from her own vers libre poetry.

What strikes me about the Patterson study is its emphasis not only on rhythm
as an experience
, but as an
inherently subjective
experience. Calling rhythm “one of the most ‘individually different' of human experiences,” Patterson explains, “Rhythm is tangled up with our sense of time and our sense of intensity, both of which are not only tricky, but multifarious.” He then follows this observation with a credo that sounds both modern and right, some ninety years after he wrote it:

Nothing is more preposterous, therefore, than that an author, the organization of whose temporal impressions is confessedly vague [do I hear a faint hint here of “I can't dance”?], should undertake to present to humanity at large a comprehensive and final statement on the art of versification. His own particular code might easily be read with interest as a document, but could hardly be expected to serve as a universal guide. On the other hand, it would be equally misleading for the experiences of an aggressively rhythmic individual, with a relatively accurate sense of temporal values, strong motor reactions, and subtle powers of discrimination in pitch and stress, to be set forth as if they were thoroughly usual. The psychologists have long since recognized that rhythm is the result of a complex process, whose operation can never be reduced to any one short formula.

Prose Rhythm the Way I Hear It

Apart from providing me with a useful and persuasive “Get Out of Jail Free” card when it comes to making systematic pronouncements about prose rhythm, Patterson also gives me a couple of terms I want to put to my own use. You may have noticed his reference to “an aggressively rhythmic individual.” According to Patterson, “rhythmic experience, rather than so-called objective rhythm” is what we should be studying. And “rhythmic experience” tends to vary from individual to individual, with the “aggressively rhythmic individual” the one who has “the ability to organize subjectively into a sort of rhythmic tune any haphazard series of sounds, provided they are not too close to be distinguished or too far apart to be held together in one wave of attention.” Or, to put this bluntly, rhythm is what we make it, something we construct rather than something we “find” or “discover.” This is what I found so promising but unfulfilled in Sonnenschein's definition of rhythm as “that property of a sequence of events in time which produces
on the mind of an observer
the impression of proportion between the durations of the several events or groups of events of which the sequence is composed.”

That's the first thing I want to borrow from Patterson, the idea of the “aggressively rhythmic individual.” I may be at sea on the dance floor, but when I read prose—particularly when I read prose aloud—I don the mask and cape of the “aggressively rhythmic individual” and I create in my reading the rhythms I most value. The second term I want to borrow from Patterson is one he applies, apparently in some desperation, to the way Amy Lowell reads her poetry. Noting that her reading of her free verse emphasizes phrases rather than feet or meter, he suggests that her reading reminds us “gently but inevitably: ‘This is a phrase! This is a phrase!'” Lowell's free verse, Patterson concludes, “lifts us necessarily out of prose experience. . . . What is achieved, as a rule, in Miss Lowell's case,” Patterson claims, “is emotional prose, emphatically phrased, excellent and moving. ‘Spaced prose,' we may call it.”

You will not be surprised to learn that in Patterson's references to Lowell's insistence “This is a phrase! This is a phrase!” as well as in his reference to her “spaced prose,” I hear an opportunity to invoke, once again, both the cumulative sentence and Josephine Miles's understanding that “[p]rose proceeds forward in time
by steps
less closely measured, but not less propelling, than the steps of verse.” What I realized is that, for me, prose rhythm is a matter not of feet or regular metrical beat but of steps—the sound a sentence makes each time it takes a step forward with a phrase or a clause. And, of course, I've made no secret of my fondness for the particular kind of step forward the cumulative syntax urges us to take. Unlike my feeling on the dance floor, where I always think I'm missing something everyone else is hearing, when it comes to prose style I think I hear—or at any rate think I create—rhythms everyone else is missing. The big difference is that my lack of a sense of rhythm in dancing comes from my perception, right or wrong, that regularity is the name of the game in dancing, but when it comes to prose, I figure variation is the name of the game. Just as prose guidebook after prose guidebook tells us that the key to effective prose rhythm lies in varying the length of our sentences, I think it equally true that the key to effective prose rhythm lies in varying the length of our phrases or
steps
within the sentence.

Tapping Out the Morse Code of Your Prose Rhythm

The cumulative sentence, quite apart from its distinctive backward and forward conceptual rhythm, its ability to backtrack and downshift to greater levels of specificity and detail, invites—indeed
encourages
—variety in the length of the cumulative phrases we add to the end of a base clause. Most of us recognize distinctive rhythms in prose but have never stopped to think about them in terms of the relationship of the long and short steps by which our sentences move forward in time. One way of thinking about these rhythmic relationships is to compare them with the dit/dah or dot/dash rhythms of Morse code. For example, writers who use cumulative modifying levels frequently alternate between long and short modifying levels, with a single word producing the effect of the Morse code dot. Thus, “Slowly, he opened the book, thumbing through its pages, stroking its cover” might be thought of as dot—dash—dash—dash. And that rhythm can be compared with that of “He opened the book, slowly, thumbing through its pages, stroking its cover,” or dash—dot—dash—dash. Each rhythm slightly changes the sentence and can create almost hypnotic effects, as we can see in this great sentence from
The Great Gatsby
: “Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.” Dot—dot—dash—dash—dash—dash. I'm still not completely sure what use we make of the insight that cumulative sentences seem to become more dramatic when they alternate longer steps with very short, single-word steps, but I'll guarantee that once you have this pattern pointed out to you, you'll start noticing it in more and more cases, a device used by a wide range of writers.

Next Steps

Your ear may respond entirely differently to prose rhythms from the way mine does, but it is important for you to recognize the ways in which those rhythms change the pace of our sentences, speeding them up, slowing them down, interrupting them, using variations in sound to create differing emphasis. The best way I know to call attention to this is to ask you to craft a sentence that contains both long and short coordinate steps, then ring the changes by trying all the different orders in which these steps can be combined. To do this, create a sentence that consists of a one-word modifying phrase, a base clause, modifying phrase A, modifying phrase B. All modifiers should modify the base clause, making this a coordinate cumulative sentence. The modifying phrases may describe a process, but can't specify an order or time scheme that prevents their being moved around. Here's an example: “Slowly, he opened the book, thumbing through its pages, stroking its cover.” Create your own sentence with equivalent steps and then methodically try every different combination of its base clause and modifiers you can think of. Read each version aloud to see how the rhythms change your understanding of and/or reaction to the sentence.

Suspensive Syntax: The Rhythm of Delay

M
ost of the sentences we've worked with so far in this book have been, in grammatical terms, “loose sentences.” That means they complete the basic pattern of subject and predicate early on, keeping subject and verb near the beginning of the sentence and keeping subject and verb close together. Most cumulative sentences are forms of loose syntax, quickly positing an initial base clause, then adding to it, detailing it, clarifying it in following modifying phrases. A sentence is considered loose no matter how long it is or how complex it is if it frontloads its subject and verb. The opposite of a loose sentence is a “periodic sentence.” Whereas the loose sentence wants to deliver its basic subject and verb information quickly, the periodic sentence wants to do just the opposite, delaying or suspending the completion of its subject-verb clause until the very end of the sentence. Sentences can be divided into these two categories. Let's turn our thinking to this important second category: periodic sentences. Consider Midwesterner Nick Carraway's description of the East in
The Great Gatsby
:

Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of . . .

Distortion
is the word with which Nick ends his sentence, and until we get to that word, we really have no clear idea where his sentence is going. The East could have had a quality of lots of things for Nick—despair, unreality, sadness, pessimism, boredom, or any of an unlimited number of other negative descriptors, but it is only when we fill in that final blank with
distortion
that we fully comprehend what Nick is telling us. That's a classic periodic sentence. And it's a really memorable, really emphatic sentence.

Privileging the Periodic Sentence

If the terminology we have inherited for talking about sentences made any sense at all, the opposite of the loose sentence would be the “tight” sentence, not the periodic. “Periodic” sounds more formal, more businesslike, more impressive than “loose”—and that's exactly the way most writing guides over the years have constructed this opposition, with loose sentences being equated with, or at least associated with, simple or simplistic expression and periodic sentences not just associated with but equated with more sophisticated, more complex thinking. Accordingly, many writing texts up until the past few years have strongly implied—if they have not openly prescribed—that writers should aspire to the formal maturity of the periodic sentence.

Number 18 of Professor Strunk's principles of composition in
The Elements of Style
is “Avoid a succession of loose sentences.” Surprisingly enough, Strunk does acknowledge that a writer could also err by using
too many
periodic sentences, but there is no mistaking the put-down in his description of loose sentences as “common in easy, unstudied writing” and in his dismissal that an “unskilled writer will sometimes construct a whole paragraph of sentences of this kind.”

Later, in his twenty-second principle, Strunk supports his championing of periodic syntax with the explanation that its “effectiveness . . . arises from the prominence it gives to the main statement” by placing it at the end of the sentence. He offers as an example:

Four centuries ago, Christopher Columbus, one of the Italian mariners whom the decline of their own republics had put at the service of the world and of adventure, seeking for Spain a westward passage to the Indies to offset the achievement of Portuguese discoverers, lighted on America.

We all know where Columbus ended up, but we're not sure where that sentence is going to end until we come to its very last word. The “main statement” or base clause of the sentence is “Christopher Columbus lighted on America,” but before we get to complete that thought, we are led on a rambling detour through the history of the decline of Italy, Spain's desire for a westward passage to the Indies, and a reminder that mariners from Portugal were on a roll.

In a negative vein, similar to that used by Professor Strunk, my old
Harbrace College Handbook
(seventh edition) urges the writer to “gain emphasis by changing loose sentences into periodic sentences.” Apparently, the problem with the loose sentence is that “it can be easily scanned, since the main idea comes toward the beginning,” while “to get the meaning of a periodic sentence, however, the reader cannot stop until he reaches the period.” Note how both Strunk and White and the
Harbrace Handbook
turn up their noses at writing that is “easy” or “easily scanned,” as if difficulty of comprehension were somehow a virtue in writing. This was one of the bits of uncritically received writing “wisdom” against which Francis Christensen championed the cumulative syntax, although as we are about to see, the dichotomy long perceived between loose and periodic sentences is largely a false one.

I want to complicate the commonly understood binary opposition between loose and periodic sentences by demonstrating that sentences take their place in a continuum of delay and can best be thought of not as “types” but in terms of their degree of “suspensiveness.” Thinking of degrees of suspense in our writing gives us much greater control over our sentences than does thinking of a kind of sentence that is loose and is the opposite of a kind of sentence that is periodic.

The great classical master of the periodic sentence and periodic style was the Roman orator Cicero. Ciceronian style is periodic style, building to a dramatic conclusion at the end of the sentence. But periodic syntax has not always been understood in this sense. As almost any history of rhetoric will note, the word
period
comes from the Greek term
periodos
, which had to do with cycles or coming back to or going around in a circle. Aristotle in particular stressed the recurrent or reflexive nature of the periodic style as a style “that turns back upon itself,” citing as examples “the antistrophes of the old poets” and even more strongly suggesting that a period offers an antithetical opposition, such as we see in his sentence “They benefited both those who had remained at home and those who had followed them; to the latter they secured more land than they had possessed at home, to the former they left land at home which was now adequate.” As Aristotle helpfully catalogs the antitheses or oppositions by which this sentence “turns back upon itself,” “those who remained at home” are opposed or balanced by “those who had followed them,” “to the latter” is opposed by “to the former,” “land . . . they had possessed” is opposed by “left land at home,” “more land” is opposed by “adequate,” and so on. For Aristotle, then, a periodic sentence was characterized by some form of “turning about,” either through opposition of contrasting ideas or through repetition—techniques that will delay our apprehension of the full meaning of the sentence until it has completed its turn or made clear its internal oppositions. As Matthew Clark points out in his 2002 study
A Matter of Style
, this identification of the periodic with antithesis—or with what we now think of as balanced form—seems peculiar to Aristotle, since “in later rhetorical theory, a period is a long sentence that uses grammatical subordination, especially to create some sort of suspense of meaning.” Missing from Aristotle's view is the emphasis on interruption or delay that we now associate with periodic form. Also missing is the close association identified by George A. Kennedy in
A New History of Classical Rhetoric
between periodic style and “writing in long, complex sentences not easily understood when first heard.”

In Search of a Better Term—and Better Understanding

I'm with Richard Lanham, who in some exasperation notes that periodic “is one of those traditional but confusing terms we ought to throw away but can't.” As he discusses in his second edition of
Analyzing Prose
, Lanham reminds us that Aristotle referred to what we now call loose sentences as “strung-along sentences” or as “running sentences.” The latter term actually seems to make more sense than “loose,” since it suggests a sentence that just goes on, with no clear destination in sight, unless and until the subject matter runs out—as opposed to the period, which has to end just so. Lanham finds fault with both of the terms we have for describing sentences, finding “running” not much more helpful than “periodic.” However, he notes that these terms do refer to different conceptual processes—a basic difference in how one human intelligence presents itself to another—if not to rigorously identifiable grammatical forms. “To imitate . . . the mind in real-time interaction with the world is to write in some form of running style,” he suggests, explaining, “Such a syntax models the mind in the act of coping with the world.” Conversely, the periodic style dramatizes “a mind which has dominated experience and reworked it to its liking, the mind showing itself after it has reasoned on the event; after it has sorted by concept and categorized by size; after it has imposed on the temporal flow the shapes through which that flow takes on a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

In historical terms, Lanham reminds us that at the end of the Renaissance, which he dates from about 1575, “a reaction set in against periodic structure as the ideal sentence shape; the call, under the banner of science, was for a new prose style that would more accurately reflect the world as it really was, not as it had been stuffed into the orderly and balanced mini-drama of the periodic sentence.” That revolution against the periodic style at the end of the Renaissance was only a mixed success, since, while most writing guidebooks today do warn against unrelieved strings of periodic sentences, they still suggest that aspiring writers should try to write periodic sentences. What I'm trying to show here is the somewhat odd history on which that advice rests. Too many poorly trained writing teachers simply accept the most recent received ideas, and too many of our standards and/or “rules” for effective writing are little more than received ideas dating from a particular period in time or from a particular critical idiosyncracy that have been uncritically passed along from teacher to student or writing text to writing text.

Once again, Lanham, one of the true original thinkers in rhetorical and composition theory, reached this conclusion well before I did. Lanham ends the chapter on “The Periodic Style and the Running Style” in his 2003 second edition of
Analyzing Prose
with an acknowledgment that undercuts years of claims that periodic syntax was the true mark of a sophisticated writer. Lanham points out that periodic syntax and running syntax, when pushed to extremes, become two sides of the same coin, since adding enough “internal qualifications and parenthetical interruptions” turns otherwise periodic syntax into a running style, while “compound pairing and balance, for syntactic regularity” turns the running style toward the periodic. I'm giving so much prominence to Lanham because, following his lead, I want to question—if not to deconstruct—the classic binary opposition between loose and periodic syntax. Francis Christensen has helped us challenge this opposition with his theory of the cumulative sentence, which introduces us to one particular kind of loose sentence that grows progressively tighter or more like the periodic sentence as it generates parallels, balances, even antitheses in its modifying phrases. However, I do not want to suggest that the cumulative is somehow a superior syntax to be preferred over the periodic. My goal is to strip away several centuries of bias in favor of the periodic to celebrate these two syntaxes for their respective glories, without claiming that one shines more brightly than the other.

The Suspensive Sentence

To move us another step away from the inherited bias in favor of periodic sentences, I'm also going to stop using the term
periodic
itself, substituting for it
suspensive
. There's no difference, really, since underlying both terms is the same aesthetic of delay, but
periodic
comes to us surrounded by connotations of length, complexity, and difficulty, whereas
suspensive
only suggests that the syntax builds suspense or suspends completion of the sentence's message to a greater or lesser degree.

To these suggestions of characteristic purpose we should probably add a brief summary of the major syntactic strategies involved in creating suspensive syntax. If the sentence suspends completion of its message, whether by delaying its main clause until the very end, by splitting the subject from the verb with qualifying material, or by using any construction that refines, sharpens, or adds to initial information before putting it to final use, it has been historically termed a periodic sentence, but I think it more accurate to refer to it as suspensive. That the periodic/suspensive sentence reverses most of the qualities of most cumulative sentences, that it seems to suggest a greater degree of control over the material it presents, that it almost always requires quite a few words before its rhythm is clear, and that it almost always slows the reader down should be fairly obvious. What is not so obvious is the fact that, when used effectively, the periodic/suspensive sentence can actually generate great interest, combining conceptual complexity with syntactic suspense.

The various delaying tactics that mark the periodic/suspensive sentence give it a suspenseful quality, a sense of its constituent parts being juggled or scrambled until the very last moment, the “shot at the buzzer,” finally falling into place at the very end of the sentence, resolved by the verb or modifier that allows us to process the information that has come before. Four tactics prevail, two of them relying on modifiers to delay completion of the base clause, two using initial clauses or phrases either as modifiers or as extended subjects. While the formally balanced sentence might be regarded as a fifth tactic, I think it more useful to consider balance a syntax in its own right, and will consider it in chapter 12.