Building Great Sentences (25 page)

rhythm in, 152–53

value of, 56

variation in length of, 152

verbals, 71–72

See also
coordinate cumulative sentences; subordinate cumulative sentence levels

Moffett, James, 246

Morrell, David, 42

Morrison, Toni, 88

movement principle, 58–59, 76, 106–7

Mrs. Dalloway
(Woolf), 141–42

“The Music of Prose” (Gass), 222

“My Darling Clementine”, 165

 

Nabokov, Vladimir, 206, 212, 214–15

A New History of Classical Rhetoric
(Kennedy), 159

New Strategy of Style
(Weathers and Winchester), 244

Notes of a Native Son
(Baldwin), 216–17

nouns, 57–58

 

Oates, Joyce Carol, 127, 131

“Of Studies” (Bacon), 209, 215

Ohman, Richard, 35–36

Omensetter's Luck
(Gass), 200

omitting needless words, 15–16, 17, 58, 97

On Being Blue
(Gass), 200, 214, 222–24

“On Keeping a Notebook” (Didion), 129

onomatopoeia, 119

“The Ontology of the Sentence” (Gass), 221–22

openers in sentences, 164, 176, 182

Orwell, George, 248

The Ox-Bow Incident
(Clark), 105

oxymorons, 119

 

Paine, Thomas, 30

paradigmatic aspects of cumulative sentences, 80

parallelism

and balanced sentences, 187–88, 194, 199

in coordinate cumulative sentences, 103, 109

definition of, 194

of Garrett, 185–86

of Kennedy, 195

power and pleasure of, 188–191

Strunk on, 190–91

in suspensive sentences, 190

Tufte on, 192

participial phrases, 72, 74

pathos, 139

Patoski, Joe Nick, 164

Pattern Recognition
(Gibson), 36–37

Patterson, William Morrison, 149–151

Payne, Michael, 217

pedagogy, 244–46

perhaps
, 131–32, 135, 137

periodic sentences

balanced sentences as, 196

classical perspectives on, 158–59

definition of, 155–56

and degrees of suspensiveness, 170

privileging of, 156–59

Renaissance perspectives on, 159

Strunk on, 156–57

term, 159, 161–62

See also
suspensive sentences

personification, 119

phatic expressions, 178–182, 218

Plotnick, Arthur, 18

Poe, Edgar Allan, 119

poetry, 46

“Politics and the English Language” (Orwell), 248

polyptoton, 213–14

polysyndeton, 207, 214

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(Joyce), 104, 105

Port-Royal Grammar
, 27, 28–29

possibly
, 131–32, 135, 137

Potter, Simeon, 191

predictive sentences, 41–43, 47

prefabricated phrases, 177–79, 218–220

prepositional phrases, 73

“The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages” (Malinowski), 179–180

processing information, importance of, 123–25, 129–130

progression, modes of, 45–48

propositions, 25–37

arrangement of, 30–34

as basic unit of writing, 5–7, 28

definition of, 25–26

implied or embedded propositions, 28–29, 34–36

methods of joining, 28

value of adding, 40

“Prose Rhythm in English” (Clark), 146

“Proverbs of Hell” (Blake), 214

Pynchon, Thomas, 126–27, 237–38

 

questions, anticipating, 39–40

 

The Rambler
(Johnson), 188

readers, 59, 66, 108–9, 181

reading aloud, benefits of, 95–99

“Reflections on Prose Style” (Klaus), 248–49

relative clauses, 49–50

repetition in writing, 87, 103, 113, 212–16

The Return of the Little Big Man
(Berger), 236–37

rhetoric, 20–22, 138–39

Rhetoric
(Aristotle), 123, 207

Rhetorical Grammar
(Kolln), 134

“The Rhetoric of the Series” (Weathers), 206, 217

rhythm, 140–154

and “aggressively rhythmic individuals,” 150, 151

Aristotle on, 144–45, 147

and article leads, 115

Christensen on, 56–57

of cumulative sentences, 53–67, 87, 105–6, 151–53, 188–89

end-focus rhythm pattern, 134

examples of, 53–55

historical explanations of, 144–150

Le Guin on, 143

and parallelism, 188–89

in phrases, 152–53

and reading aloud, 95–99

and style, 94, 143, 144

subjective nature of, 150

Woolf on, 94, 143

See also
balanced sentences; serial construction

The Rhythm of Prose
(Patterson), 149–150

right-branching sentences, 59, 76

A Room of One's Own
(Woolf), 163–64

rules of grammar, 246–47

 

Saintsbury, George, 146, 147

Santayana, George, 208

Schuster, Edgar H., 247

Seattle (chief), 213

“The Secret Sharer” (Conrad), 34–36, 124–25

sequential restrictions, 107–8

serial construction, 204–25

of Bacon, 209

and balanced form, 208, 216–18

epistrophe in, 208

of Gass, 221–25

and mini-balances, 218–220

patterns in, 207–8, 210–16

power of, 206–7, 220–21

Weathers on, 206–7

Shakespeare, William, 168, 175

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 199

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (Hemingway), 240–41

short sentences, 42, 170–71

similes, 119, 121–23, 125–28, 130–32

Simple & Direct
(Barzun), 16

Smith, Bradford, 193

sociability, expressions of, 178–182

“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” (Didion), 174–75, 214

Sonnenschein, E. A., 147–48, 151

Soul on Ice
(Cleaver), 212

Spark, Muriel, 51

Spector, Phil, 175

speculation, 118, 119–120, 128–133, 135–36, 137–38

Spunk and Bite
(Plotnick), 18

Steering the Craft
(Le Guin), 143, 229

Stein, Gertrude

on the continuous present, 105

Gass on, 221

on the pleasure of words, 3–4, 6–7, 8, 9, 10

on primacy of sentences, 224

on repetition, 87

Steinbeck, John, 13–14, 20, 87, 192–93

Stewart, Garrett, 185–86

The Strategy of Style
(Weathers and Winchester), 169–170, 174

Strunk, William

on emphatic words, 134

on loose and periodic sentences, 156

on omitting needless words, 15–16, 17, 97

on parallel construction, 190–91

and predictive style, 43

style

and arrangement of propositions, 30–34

definition of, 22–23

functions of, 34, 118, 124, 129

importance of, 249

individuality in, 118, 129–130

and kernel sentences, 41

and meaning, 9–10, 23

metaphor for, 9

nature of, 248–49

purpose of, 253

and rhythm, 94, 143, 144

teaching style, 249–254

Woolf on, 94, 143

Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm
(Croll), 146

Style: An Anti-Textbook
(Lanham), 21, 249

Style and Proportion
(Miles), 45–47

subjects, 70

subordinate sentences

subordinate cumulative sentence levels, 86–88, 90, 101, 104, 109–11, 113

subordinative strategy in sentence construction, 44, 47

suspensive sentences, 155–167, 168–183

combinations of, 173–74

conditional pattern, 164–66

suspensive sentences (
cont
.)

degrees of suspensiveness, 169–172

delayed base-clause pattern, 163–64

and end-focus rhythm pattern, 134

extended-subject pattern, 166

function of, 169

inverted-cumulative pattern, 162–63

mini-scripting, 176–182

and misplaced modifiers, 78–79

parallelism in, 190

patterns in, 170–72

and phatic expressions, 178–182

sentence openers of, 164, 176

term, 161–62

use of, 174

See also
periodic sentences

Sweet Thursday
(Steinbeck), 192–93

syllogisms, 220

symploce, 208, 214

syntagmatic characteristic of cumulative sentences, 80

 

A Tale of Two Cities
(Dickens), 184–85

A Temple of Texts
(Gass), 200

temporal restrictions, 107–8

texture of cumulative sentences, 62–63

that
, 44

A Theory of Discourse
(Kinneavy), 246

“This Is the House That Jack Built” (Mother Goose), 49–50

Thompson, Hunter, 213

three-part series.
See
serial construction

To the Lighthouse
(Woolf), 165

“Tough, Sweet & Stuffy” (Gibson), 42–43

Tucker, Ken, 171

Tufte, Virginia, 48, 50–51, 104, 105, 192, 231–32

The Tunnel
(Gass), 200

Twain, Mark, 163

 

Under the Volcano
(Lowry), 201

Updike, John, 130–31

 

verbals, 71–72, 114

verbs, 70–71

Villa, James, 175

Vineland
(Pynchon), 237–38

 

Walsh, Bill, 18

Weathers, Winston

on Grammar B, 250–52

on serial constructions, 206, 216, 217

on style, 244, 250

on suspensive syntax, 169–170, 174

Webster, Daniel, 208

What Is Rhythm?
(Sonnenschein), 147–48

“When You Are Old” (Yeats), 214

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (Oates), 127, 131

which
, 44

White, E. B.

on arrangement of propositions, 30

cumulative sentences of, 87, 92, 133

opinions signaled by, 138

on similes, 122–23

on style, 23

Whitman, Walt, 221

who
, 44

Who Owns the West?
(Kittredge), 171

Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife
(Gass), 200

Wimsatt, W. K., Jr., 187–88

Winchester, Otis, 169–170, 174, 244

Wolfe, Tom, 252

Woolf, Leonard, 172, 241

Woolf, Virginia, 94, 141–42, 143, 163–64, 165

word choice and order, 7–9, 17

The World Within the Word
(Gass), 200

 

The Year of Magical Thinking
(Didion), 241

Yeats, William B., 214

Young, Marguerite, 233–34