Building Great Sentences (3 page)

Any word we write is chosen from a list of synonyms or a list of words that are either more or less abstract. When I write “I got into my car,” for instance, I could use a more abstract word such as
vehicle
or
transportation
. I got in my vehicle. I got in my transportation. Or I could use a less abstract word such as
sedan
or
minivan
. I got in my sedan. I got in my minivan. Or I could choose an even less abstract, more precise word or term, such as
Ford
or
Ford Fusion
. “I got in my Ford Fusion.” You can imagine a vertical series of more abstract words above the word we choose, or more precise words below the word we choose. Semanticists refer to this paradigmatic axis as the “ladder of abstraction,” and it reminds us that one of the important variables in our writing is the degree of precision in our choice of the words we use.

The other major choice we make when we write a sentence is the order in which we arrange the words we choose. For example, Stein could just as easily have made her question “Why should we get anything but pleasure from a sequence of words?” We might think of the order in which words appear in a sentence as choices made along that horizontal or syntagmatic axis we call syntax.

Form Is Content; Style Is Meaning

Now that we've identified the three main factors that determine the style and effectiveness of our writing—propositional content, word choice, and syntax—let's go back to our sentence from Gertrude Stein one more time to see the most important assumption underlying this book: that
the same words in different order have different meanings
, or to put this another way, that
style is content.

Most of us have been taught to think of style and meaning, or form and content, as two different things and, indeed, it is almost impossible to talk about language without resorting to this binary opposition. We think of content as the ideas or information our writing conveys, and we think of style as the way in which we present these ideas. Many aphorisms and metaphors have been used through the years to describe style, ranging from “Style is the man himself” to “Style is the dress of thought.” Most of these metaphors confuse our understanding of style as much as or more than they clarify it. If we have to use a metaphor to explain style, we might better think of the onion, which consists of numerous layers of onion we can peel away until there's nothing left. The onion is its layers, and those layers don't contain a core of “onionness,” but they are themselves the onion.

Similarly, when we write a sentence, the way we choose to order its propositional content subtly affects that content so that the meaning changes ever so slightly with every vocabulary and syntactical choice we make. It's probably safe to say that all of us can agree that the point of Stein's “Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?” is that words should do more than just convey information, that language is itself an experience worth considering, quite apart from its reference. But do we really believe that “Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?” means exactly the same as:

Why shouldn't words in sequence always be a pleasure?

Shouldn't a sequence of words be always a pleasure?

A sequence of words should always be a pleasure.

We read these sentences differently. Each reflects different stylistic choices, and each hits the reader just a little bit differently than does Stein's original sentence, which is dismissive of opposition, as only Gertrude Stein could be. Another way of looking at this assumption is to say that when we write, we are doing something with our sentences, and what we do unfolds in time, whether to our readers' eyes or ears. The summarizable information conveyed in our sentences is only a part of their meaning, since what they do to a reader, the way they direct the reader's thinking, may be at least as important as the information they contain.

The point of all this is simply to remind us of something we never forget in speaking to one another—that the way we say things may be as important as or more important than what we say—but it's something we frequently forget when we are writing. This inseparability of form from content was what poet Archibald MacLeish was trying to explain in his poem “Ars Poetica”
when he famously noted that “a poem should not mean / but be.”

Understanding how sentences put propositions together is the first step in understanding how they work and learning how to make them work for us. We will do this by studying the ways in which sentences combine information by coordinating it, subordinating it, or subsuming it in modification. I'm going to throw a bunch of terms at you that are simply fancy ways of talking about sentence structure. We will look at the difference between sentences that combine information through loose syntax that puts the subject and verb near the beginning of the sentence, and those that do so through periodic syntax, delaying the unfolding of the sentence's most important news until the very end, creating a sense of suspense that demands the reader's attention, sometimes to that very last word. We will pay particular attention to the cumulative sentence, a special kind of loose syntax that can also function suspensefully (and, as we will see, suspensively) because it offers powerful generative or heuristic advantages to the writer who understands its forms. We will study the sentence as a thing in motion, a thing alive, considering the strategies writers can use to give sentences pace and rhythm, particularly the duple rhythms of balance and the three-beat rhythms of serial constructions.

I'm not sure where great writers come from or how to become one. I wish I knew! I am sure, however, where
better
writers come from and how to become one. All of us can learn to use the tools and strategies writers need to master in order to write great sentences. This book will identify and explain what I think are the most important and most useful tools and strategies for improving our writing.

Next Steps

Craft a short sentence that contains at least a subject, a verb, and an object. It can be as simple as “The teacher entertained his students with a humorous lecture.” Consider the several propositions that actually underlie your sentence. Then consider “ladder of abstraction” possibilities that are both more abstract and more precise options for each word in your sentence. (This will cause you to think about the sentence's paradigmatic axis.) And, finally, consider how you might rearrange the words and/or underlying propositions of your sentence. (This will cause you to think about the sentence's syntagmatic axis—or syntax.) For example, the sentence I suggested above might be reconsidered with changes to both axes to read: “Captivating his English majors, the professor delivered a hilarious lecture.”

Grammar and Rhetoric

I
've always been fond of a distinction John Steinbeck draws in his introduction to
The Log from the Sea of Cortez
, a little book describing a marine-specimen-collecting trip Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts made in 1940. Steinbeck considers what it means to go on an expedition, and how each expedition inevitably shapes the reality it hopes to study. He notes that naming the parts of a fish and cataloging a fish in terms of its structure doesn't actually tell the full story. As he explains, a fish can be rigorously identified by counting its spines:

For example: the Mexican sierra has “XVII-15-IX” spines in the dorsal fin. These can be easily counted. But if the sierra strikes hard on the line so that our hands are burned, if the fish sounds and nearly escapes and finally comes in over the rail, his colors pulsing and his tail beating the air, a whole new relational externality has come into being—an entity which is more than the sum of the fish plus the fisherman. The only way to count the spines of the sierra unaffected by this second relational reality is to sit in a laboratory, open an evil-smelling jar, remove a stiff, colorless fish from a formalin solution, count the spines, and write the truth “D.XVII-15-IX.” There you have recorded a reality which cannot be assailed—probably the least important reality concerning either the fish or yourself.

Sure, Steinbeck is slanting the case to stress the subjective relationship we might have with a living fish over the technical, objective way we might need to identify the fish. But I love his reminder about the great differences that exist between the way we experience a live fish in nature and the way we encounter a dead fish in the laboratory. And his point seems to me to apply equally to sentences, and not just because they can also be slippery. Most of the terms we use to identify sentences or to label their parts treat the sentence as something dead, something to be dissected, its parts laid out on a table to be identified. This ignores the fact that what Steinbeck terms a “relational reality” exists between sentences and readers, just as surely and much more frequently, with much more usually at stake, than exists between a fisherman and a fish.

Whenever possible, I will use terms that focus on the sentence as a thing in motion, an experience, something with which we form a relational reality when we read, rather than something stiff and lifeless, whose parts can be counted or named. I see this distinction as primarily between viewing the sentence as a grammatical phenomenon or as a rhetorical phenomenon.

Impressive Writing Is Effective Writing

But before I get to the distinctions between grammatical and rhetorical concerns, I want to consider two judgmental terms I'll be using in my discussion of sentences:
effective
and
impressive
. Both of those modifiers have everything to do with what Steinbeck is talking about when he describes the relational reality someone might have with a living fish, and not much at all to do with labeling and categorizing with objective rigor. What one reader or writer may find impressive is not the same as what another reader or writer may find impressive, and while we may be able to measure effectiveness a bit more objectively than we can measure how impressive something is, determining how effective writing is remains largely a matter of personal taste. Let me tell you what I mean by these two important terms.

First,
effective
: Effective writing is writing that anticipates, shapes, and satisfies a reader's need for information. Effective writing gives the reader the information necessary for thoughtful consideration of the writer's purpose in introducing a subject. It anticipates the obvious questions an interested reader may form, and it accomplishes both the informational and emotional goals of the writer. Effective writing guides the reader's thinking, satisfies the reader's need for essential information, and implicitly assures the reader that he or she is in good hands, reading prose by a writer who anticipates both the reader's informational and emotional needs.

Unless the situation demands otherwise, sentences that convey more information are more effective than those that convey less. Sentences that anticipate and answer more questions that a reader might have are better than those that answer fewer questions. Sentences that bring ideas and images into clearer focus by adding more useful details and explanation are generally more effective than those that are less clearly focused and that offer fewer details. In practice, this means that I generally value longer sentences over shorter sentences, as long as the length accomplishes some of those important goals I've just mentioned.

Many of us have been exposed over the years to the idea that effective writing is
simple and direct
, a term generally associated with Strunk and White's legendary guidebook,
The Elements of Style
. Or we remember some of the slogans from that book, such as “Omit needless words.” Unfortunately, it's a lot harder for us to remember that Strunk concluded his discussion of the mandate to omit needless words with this all-important qualifier: “This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or that he avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” Strunk's concern is specifically with words and phrases that do not add propositions to the sentence, phrases like “the reason why is that” used in place of “because,” or “owing to the fact that” in place of “since.” It's far easier to remember the term
simple and direct
as a summary of Jacques Barzun's advice in his
Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers
than it is to remember that simple does not mean simplistic, direct does not mean short, and simple and direct does not mean that we should all write like Ernest Hemingway in a hurry.

I like Faulkner as well as I like Hemingway, and I'd like to believe that even William Strunk and certainly E. B. White would not have tried to edit Faulkner out of existence. When Hemingway writes “He disliked bars and bodegas,” speaking of an old waiter in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” few of us would argue that his sentence is not simple and direct or that it is cluttered with needless words. But when Faulkner writes about the boy who's the protagonist in “Barn Burning” it's hard to see how Strunk and White's admonition might apply:

The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish—this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of the blood.

Simple and direct it most certainly is not. Both writers, Faulkner and Hemingway, introduce us to the thinking of their characters, but just as the thinking of Hemingway's old waiter is infinitely more tired and less active than the thinking of Faulkner's boy, the sentence each writer constructs is intended to hit us in very different ways for very different reasons. Start cutting out words and simplifying the syntax in Faulkner's sentence and we'll miss the complex thinking that haunts the boy throughout the story.

But even Hemingway, the poster boy for simple and direct, reminds us that a simple and direct sentence is not the same as one that is simplistic and short, as we can see from another, earlier sentence from “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”: “In the daytime, the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference.” While the propositions in this sentence are very short and are simply tacked together by conjunctions, the repeated use of
and
to link these propositions taps into the emotional power of polysyndeton, the classical rhetorical trope of stressing the use of conjunctions where a comma would suffice, in this case building a sense of great calm. A summary of the propositional content of this sentence would sound quite simple, but the rhetorical and affective impact of the sentence is carefully designed and employs a sophisticated rhetorical pattern.

“Omit needless words” is great advice, but not when it gets reduced to the belief that shorter is always better, or that “needless” means any word without which the sentence can still make sense. I don't intend any advice I give about writing sentences to contradict the generally quite useful advice we can find in Strunk and White, but I do want to suggest that it presents a very subjective aesthetic. Strunk and White do a great job of reminding us to avoid needless words, but they don't begin to consider all of the ways in which more words might actually be needed. My goal will be to explain why, in many cases,
we need to add words to improve our writing
, as Faulkner so frequently does, rather than trying to pare our writing down to some kind of telegraphic minimum, as is frequently the case with Hemingway.

While I'm mentioning Strunk and White, let me suggest that we could all do a lot worse than digging out that tattered copy we've had since high school or college and giving it a fresh read. Then let me suggest you acquire and put on your bookshelf, right next to Strunk and White's
Elements of Style
, Bill Walsh's
Elephants of Style
, subtitled
A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English
. And there's also another wonderfully irreverent critique of the Strunk and White bible in Arthur Plotnick's
Spunk and Bite: A Writer's Guide to Punchier, More Engaging Language and Style.

Now,
impressive
: Effective writing is largely determined by how well the writer's efforts respond to the situation that has occasioned the writing, the writer's purpose in writing, and the reader's needs. Most of us can agree whether writing is effective or not, although we may disagree widely about whether one kind of effective writing is preferable to another. Impressive writing is much harder for us to agree upon, and indeed, the implication of Strunk and White and a number of other guidebooks about writing might be that impressive writing—writing that calls attention to itself through complexity, elegance, or some other rhetorical flourish—is gaudy writing, overly lush, opulent, and mannered, and therefore should be avoided. What I term an impressive sentence will frequently display some form of “elegance” that may at first seem above and beyond the requirements of effectiveness. In his celebrated
Modern English Usage
, H. W. Fowler specifically warns against “elegant variation” in prose style, what he characterizes as the tendency of second-rate writers to concentrate more on “expressing themselves prettily” than on “conveying their meaning clearly.”

I don't want to argue with Fowler any more than I want to argue with Strunk and White, so let me say that I'm referring to “impressive prose style” in the same way mathematicians refer to an elegant solution to a math problem. In fact, elegant solutions in math are the most direct routes to solving a problem, taking the fewest number of steps, offering the solution that is seen as the simplest, neatest, or cleanest response to a problem, no matter how complex the problem is. Writing problems, of course, are very different from mathematical problems.

As Jacques Barzun reminds us, “Language is not an algebra,” and there is no single right answer to any given predicament with words. In impressive writing, elegance is indeed a matter of efficiency, but we need to remember that the problems a writer attempts to solve have an emotional dimension not associated with mathematics. There may be only one elegant solution to a math problem; there may be many different impressive solutions to a problem we address with language.

There may not be that much difference between writing we find effective and writing we find impressive. The two may actually be inextricably wrapped up with each other. We might think of impressive writing as writing that is unusually effective. Both terms, however, are subjectively relational, having to do with the impact writing has on a reader, with the way the reader experiences writing, rather than being objectively describable
only
in terms of the propositions they advance.

When we refer to sentences as being effective or impressive, we refer to what they do, rather than the parts they consist of, and no amount of sophisticated vocabulary or complicated syntax can make a sentence effective or impressive unless that sentence accomplishes the task it was intended to accomplish. Both Hemingway and Faulkner strike me as impressive writers because they're so good at accomplishing what they set out to do. It's hard to imagine the writer who could out-Hemingway Hemingway or out-Faulkner Faulkner, and attempts to do so generally seem humorous, as each found the impressive and elegant solution to the problems he wanted to write about.

Grammar Is Not Rhetoric

The final two terms I want to discuss,
grammatical
and
rhetorical
, are both easier to define than
effective
and
impressive
, and they're more important. If we remember Steinbeck's discussion of different ways of looking at and thinking about the Mexican sierra, we might say that grammatical descriptions of the sentence are primarily concerned with identifying its parts, while rhetorical descriptions of the sentence are primarily concerned with identifying that relational reality established when a reader reads or hears the sentence.

Grammar has to do with relationships among words, largely irrespective of their meaning. Grammar classifies words by their function in a sentence, by what part of speech a word may be, how we refer to its tense if it's a verb, whether a noun is singular or plural, and whether it agrees with the verb: The doctor
is
a woman. The swimmers
are
men. Grammar deals with the rules underlying our understanding and use of language. Most of these rules we've unconsciously known ever since we learned to speak.