Building Great Sentences (2 page)

A Sequence of Words

“
T
his is what I mean when I call myself a writer,” writes novelist Don DeLillo. “I construct sentences.” Thomas Berger, the author of
Little Big Man
and a writer, like DeLillo, long celebrated for the vitality of his language, makes much the same point when he terms the sentence “the cell beyond which the life of the book cannot be traced, a novel being a structure of such cells.” As Berger explains:

In another sense, only the sentence exists or at any rate can be proved to exist. Even at the stage of the paragraph, things are becoming theoretical and arbitrary. A “novel” is an utter hallucination: no definition of it, for example, can really distinguish it from a laundry list. But a sentence—there you have something essential, to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken.

Of course, the sentence in which Berger describes the sentence as “something essential, to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken” is not just a sentence—that's a great sentence! And here's the beauty of great sentences: they come in all shapes and sizes and lots of different things can make them great. Great precision and specificity, great dramatic impact, great sound, great ways in which they direct the reader's thinking, great ways in which they reveal the writer's mind at work, great logical progression, great imagery—and the list goes on and on. Once we start looking at and thinking about individual sentences, rather than simply thinking of the sentence as just another brick in a wall of words, once we consider the sentence with the care we bring to the reading of poetry, we separate ourselves from most other readers and writers and can set out in pursuit of greatness. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Michael Cunningham should be our guide here, with his wonderful comment: “I'm still hoping to write a great sentence. If I do, I'll let you know.”

I think I know why Cunningham, DeLillo, and Berger declare their passionate allegiance to the sentence, and while I don't pretend to write sentences as well as they do, I believe that the sentence is where we must start if we hope to understand why some writing captivates us and other writing leaves us unmoved. To be better writers, we must first and foremost write better sentences. I'm absolutely certain that whatever great writing may be, the secret to achieving it has largely to do with learning how to write great sentences. So, as I said before, this will be a book about sentences. Even more bluntly, this will be a book about how to make sentences longer.

Why longer? It's hard to improve on any of the well-known, justly celebrated one- and two-word sentence classics our culture has enshrined. “Jesus wept,” the shortest verse in the New Testament, comes to mind, as does “Nuts!” the famous reply offered by General Anthony McAuliffe, acting commander of the 101st Airborne, when the Germans demanded his surrender during the Battle of the Bulge. But no one can really teach how to write one- and two-word sentences, and most of us will go a lifetime without being presented with the opportunity for crafting stunning short sentences. So, for reasons I hope to make clear as we go along, this is a book about how we make sentences longer, and it's based on my assumption that longer sentences—and this is important—
when carefully crafted and tightly controlled
, are essential keys to great writing. Listen to Joseph Conrad's elegantly balanced and extended sentence describing a native woman in
Heart of Darkness
, a sentence I truly love: “She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress.” I find that sentence more interesting
as a sentence
than either “Nuts!” or “Jesus wept.”

There's an old advertising slogan originally made famous by a cigarette manufacturer: “It's not how long you make it, but how you make it long.” We will not be making sentences longer to showcase our big vocabularies or simply because we can. A longer sentence is not necessarily a better sentence, but a sentence containing more useful information, more specific detail, and more explanation will
almost
always be better than a shorter sentence that lacks that information, detail, and explanation. And longer sentences, when they are appropriate, need to be carefully designed and controlled in ways that make them easy to follow and understand: more information, detail, and explanation are wasted if the reader cannot easily keep in mind what the sentence is doing. My goal is to show you how to add to the informational texture of your sentences—their propositional content—and consider their affective or dramatic impact on your readers.

What Sentences Do

“Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?” Gertrude Stein once asked. Certainly the sequences of words we identify as sentences are capable of providing pleasure, just as surely as they are capable of conveying crucial information. Sometimes the most important information sentences convey
is
pleasure, as they unfold their meanings in ways that tease, surprise, test, and satisfy. Sometimes the way sentences unfold their meaning is the most important meaning they offer.

Let's start by thinking about what a sentence is and how it works, and let's start with that sentence from Gertrude Stein: “Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?” We know sentences can function as exclamations, imperatives, declarations, or interrogatives, and this one seems at first glance to be an interrogative. It asks a question. It's a simple question. Or is it? Isn't it really a declaration that a sequence of words
should be
a pleasure? Or is it an invitation to list the numerous occasions when a sequence of words is definitely not a pleasure? “I have a case of stomach flu” comes to mind, or “The Internal Revenue Service has selected your return from last year for an audit.” Not much pleasure there! Or is it an argument that language should do nothing but give pleasure? Does it almost have the force of an exclamation—saying, in effect, “Words in sequence—always a pleasure!” What does this seemingly simple sequence of words actually mean? How does it actually work?

Insofar as we think we understand what Stein meant with the above phrase, what are some of the ways she could have gotten that meaning across with different sentences? Just think of a few of the many, many different ways she might have written this sentence:

Why should a sequence of words not be a pleasure?

Why should a sequence of words not give pleasure?

Shouldn't a sequence of words always give pleasure?

A sequence of words should always be a pleasure.

A sequence of words should always be pleasurable.

Words in sequence should always give pleasure.

We should always find pleasure in a sequence of words.

Why should a sequence of words not always give us pleasure?

And so on and on and on.

Not Just a Sequence of Words: The Basic Elements of a Sentence

Sentences are sequences of words, but just adding words together to make a sequence does not create a sentence. “Teacher yellow September swims hungry” is a sequence of words, but it's not a sentence because it lacks a subject and a predicate and therefore does not express a proposition. “I am a teacher” is a sequence of words that is a sentence because it contains a subject, “I,” and a predicate, “am a teacher,” and thus it does advance a proposition. The subject is who or what is spoken of or talked about, and the predicate is what is said about the subject. Usually the subject of a sentence will be a noun or noun phrase or pronoun, and the predicate will contain some form of verb.

A proposition, which is usually expressed in the form of a sentence, is a statement about reality that can be accepted or rejected. The relationship between propositions and sentences is a little hard to pin down, since a sentence will advance or express one or more propositions, and a proposition will always be in the form of a sentence. The key here is to think of a sentence as being a visible piece of writing, while the propositions it advances are not necessarily written out. The easiest way of thinking about this relationship is to say that a written sentence usually rests on or contains or combines a number of underlying propositions, most of which the sentence simply assumes, and which would be too basic or simple-sounding to actually write out. If we write “Estranged from his family, ineffectual in his teaching, and disappointed in his writing, James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus seeks refuge in the life of the mind,” we have suggested much more about Stephen than how he seeks refuge.

I like to think of the written sentence as the part of the iceberg you see above water, while many of its underlying propositions remain out of sight underwater. To put it another way, propositions are the atoms from which the molecule of the sentence is constructed. Most propositions usually contain several smaller or constituent propositions, as we see in the proposition I mentioned a moment ago, “I am a teacher,” which contains within it the proposition that I exist (there is an I), and that there is a thing called teacher, and that I am one of those things. So, while many of us have been taught that a sentence is a sequence of words containing a subject and a predicate that expresses an idea, it's actually the case that most sentences express or imply
a number
of ideas. “I like hamburgers” expresses a thought, but what exactly do I mean by
like
? What kind of hamburger am I thinking of, and why do I want someone to know this about my taste habits? As is frequently the case, many questions can be asked about this simple declaration, and each question reminds us of unspoken, unwritten propositions that may underlie the surface of this seemingly simple sentence. The sentence above about Stephen Dedalus, for example, rests on numerous propositions about his family, his occupation, and his state of mind.

We all know that sentences can convey a host of meanings, both intended and unintended, just as the manner of conveying any meaning may differ along a continuum of emotional impacts, described by stylistic theorist Walker Gibson as ranging from “tough style” to “sweet style” to “stuffy style.” For instance, I might have said “You better believe I like hamburgers,” which would be “tough style,” or “Don't you think hamburgers are just fabulous?” which would be a “sweet style,” or “My gastronomic preferences include, but are not limited to, that peculiarly American version of the sandwich known as a hamburger”—definitely a “stuffy style.”

If we return for a moment to Gertrude Stein's sentence, “Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?” we can see that it actually advances a number of propositions, including that there are these things we call words. Words can be put together in a sequence. Words in a sequence can give pleasure. Words in a sequence ought to give pleasure. Words in a sequence should give nothing but pleasure, and are there reasons why words in a sequence should not be a pleasure?

I'm trying to make the point that the basic unit of writing is the proposition, not the word or even a sequence of words,
and we build sentences by putting propositions together.
The style of our sentences is determined by the ways in which we combine not words, but the propositions those words stand for or refer to. One of our first goals will be to understand how sentences combine propositions to present information, and how we can present our own ideas more effectively.

Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Choices

Each sentence we write reflects several choices: Why write rather than speak? What should we write about, and what do we want to accomplish in writing about it? Which words should we use? In what order should we put those words? There's not much any writing teacher can do to tell you when to write or to help you choose your subject matter or to help you decide what you want your writing to do. But I can address some important things you'll want to keep in mind as you choose your words, particularly the degree of precision in your vocabulary choices, and I can address how you put together the words you choose. We call that order “syntax.”

The order in which our sentences unfold or hit the reader is entirely within our control. Even better, syntactical choices can help us increase the precision of our writing, bringing what we say into sharper focus, even if we don't have a mental thesaurus.

Sometimes language scholars refer to the choice of words we use as “paradigmatic choices” and the choices about the order we put them in as “syntagmatic choices.” We can imagine that each sentence we write results from paradigmatic choices we make along a vertical axis of alternate vocabulary choices we might make for each word in the sentence. Each sentence we write results from syntagmatic choices we make along a horizontal axis we read from left to right: deciding whether to put the verb early or late in the sentence, deciding where to put modifying phrases, deciding whether the information in the sentence will be coordinated (adding phrases like cars to a train) or subordinated (one piece of information made a clarifying helper to a more important piece of information). The terms
paradigmatic
and
syntagmatic
are not in themselves important for us to remember, but they help us understand two of the most important variables in our writing: word choice and word order.

Going back to Stein's “Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?” we can see that in place of “sequence of words” she might have said “string of words” or “series of words” or “bunch of words” or “combination of words” or “number of words.” Or she might just have said, “Why should words be anything but a pleasure?” leaving out
sequence
altogether. But she chose the word
sequence
over a number of other possibilities, just as she chose to use the word
pleasure
over
gratification
,
satisfaction
,
joy
,
delight
, or any number of other words suggesting a positive experience.