Building Great Sentences (6 page)

While every few feet, verse reverses, repeats, and reassesses the pattern of its progression, prose picks up momentum toward its forward goal in strides variably adapted to its burdens and purposes. Both use steps; neither merely flows; each may be perceived and followed by its own stages of articulation.

Leave it to a poet to literalize the practice of measuring poetic meter in terms of feet, and to remind us that feet take steps. More important, Miles reminds us that the language of prose moves forward in time, one word following another, just as surely as does the language of poetry: “Poetry calls attention to its movement by meter, by line stops, by sentences, by rhyme schemes, by stanzas, while prose measures its unfolding in ways much less obvious, but no less certain.” She offers as an example of prose “steps” the following sentence: “Early in the morning, in a small town, near the highway, because he was hungry and though he was in danger, the young boy, looking neither to left, nor to right, climbed the path to the city hall.”

Miles marks the steps this sentence takes typographically, putting spaces between its steps.

Early in the morning, in a small town, near the highway, because he was hungry, and though he was in danger, the young boy, looking, neither to left, nor to right, climbed the path, to the city hall.

She then translates her grammatical analysis of this sentence into the underlying propositions it describes. By now, this move to unpack unwritten propositions should feel pretty familiar to us. She notes that if the qualifiers and connectives in this sentence were transformed back to their root predications, we would read:

The time was early.

The time was morning.

The place was a town.

The town was small.

The town was near a highway.

The boy was young.

The boy was hungry.

The boy was in danger.

The boy did not look to the left.

The boy did not look to the right.

The boy climbed the path.

The path belonged to the city hall.

Indeed, Miles explains what she's doing by referring to—you've guessed it—that celebrated sentence from the Port Royal Grammarians, “Invisible God created the visible world.” What results from her propositional unpacking is, of course, a highly predicative version. At the other extreme, she shows what might happen if the phrases and clauses of this sentence were to be reduced to qualifiers, resulting in a highly adjectival style: “Early this morning in a small highway town, hungry and in danger, the young boy, looking neither left nor right, climbed the city-hall path.”

Accordingly, she suggests that we can think of prose as having three primary modes of progression, three primary ways in which it takes its steps: the predicative, the connective-subordinate, and the adjectival. I've slightly modified Miles's overview by calling the predicative style the starting point from which we build longer sentences, and then stating that there are three main ways in which we can go about that building or growing, choosing among and/or mixing three strategies for adding propositional information, those strategies being the connective, the subordinative, and the adjectival.

Adjectival Steps

What I find most useful in Miles's approach to sentence style is the idea that the sentence unfolds in time
by taking steps
. And adjectival steps, specifically the kind of adjectival step taken by modifying phrases in cumulative sentences, intrigue me most because I think they offer tremendous rewards for the writer. This syntax has been championed by a number of writing teachers, most notably by Francis Christensen, who termed it “cumulative” and gave us the theory of the cumulative sentence. Much more about Christensen in the next chapter, but for now I want to keep my larger focus on growing sentences by adjectival steps.

The first step in writing longer, more effective sentences that grow by taking adjectival steps is to start from a relatively short and simple base clause and then build the longer sentence around it. Chris Anderson emphasizes this point in his really helpful writing text,
Free/Style: A Direct Approach to Writing
. Like me and like Virginia Tufte, Anderson is a fan of cumulative sentences, and he puts this at the center of his advice for improving writing:

Say things directly, the subject first and then what the subject is doing. Then trail the modifiers, putting the modifying phrases at the end of the straightforward declarations, expanding and contracting them, adjusting their rhythm as you need to, creating texture, refining with detail.

As that last sentence illustrates, Anderson practices what he preaches, and his formula for the cumulative sentence, centered on adding free modifying phrases to a short base clause, explains how the cumulative creates both a conceptual pattern and a sound pattern. His sentence is doing precisely what it describes. Almost any relative clause can be boiled down to a modifying phrase that, if not shorter, is easier to follow than a series of clauses calling our attention to information tied to “that” or to “who” or to “whom” or to “which.”

It may be helpful here to remember the classic Mother Goose poem, “This Is the House That Jack Built”:

This is the house that Jack built.

This is the malt

That lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the rat,

That ate the malt

That lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the cat,

That killed the rat,

That ate the malt

That lay in the house that Jack built.

And so on, until we reach a final verse that could stand as an ode to the relative clause:

This is the farmer sowing his corn,

That kept the cock that crowed in the morn,

That waked the priest all shaven and shorn,

That married the man all tattered and torn,

That kissed the maiden all forlorn,

That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,

That tossed the dog,

That worried the cat,

That killed the rat,

That ate the malt

That lay in the house that Jack built.

I'd love to know whether or not the unknown author of that poem was a frustrated writing teacher, but its cascade of “that” clauses certainly suggests that the author had gotten his or her fill of relative clauses—and so should we. Instead of relying on little clauses that have
who
or
that
or
which
as their subject and that tell us something about the subject, we should boil that relative clause down to a modifying word or phrase. Indeed, the author of “This Is the House That Jack Built” starts doing this, whether out of inspiration or desperation, in the poem's final stanza. Instead of “This is the farmer that sows his corn” we get “This is the farmer sowing his corn.” Instead of “That waked the priest that was all shaven and shorn” or “The man that was all tattered and torn” or “The maiden that was all forlorn,” we get modifiers that omit both the relative pronoun and the verb.

There are a number of ways in which relative clauses can go amiss, and their main claim to utility is that they are committed to specification. While specification is generally a fine goal in writing, we should remember that the rhetoric of specification is the rhetoric of the law and of legal documents. In her 1971 book
Grammar as Style: Exercises in Creativity
, Virginia Tufte challenged writers to use free modifiers to craft a sentence from the raw material of the six following propositions:

He went to speak to Mrs. Bean.

She was tiny among the pillows.

Her small toothless mouth was open like an O.

Her skin was stretched thin and white over her bones.

Her huge eye sockets and eyes were in a fixed infant-like stare.

And her sparse white hair was short and straggling over her brow.

If those propositions sound unusually specific to you, it's because Tufte had extracted them from a sentence in
Memento Mori
by Muriel Spark. The sentence reads:

He went to speak to Mrs. Bean, tiny among the pillows, her small toothless mouth open like an “O,” her skin stretched thin and white over her bones, her huge eye-sockets and eyes in a fixed, infant-like stare, and her sparse white hair short and straggling over her brow.

Tufte, probably our most accomplished current student of sentence structure, is a big fan of adding propositions to sentences by adding free modifying words and phrases following a short base clause, noting again and again in her writing how this technique allows us to write sentences that can grow to considerable length without becoming hard to follow or unpleasant to the ear.

Next Steps

The Next Steps suggestions for the past couple of chapters may have taxed your patience with variations on “unpacking” and “repacking” propositions that underlie the surface wording and structure of sentences, but now it's time to nail down the somewhat amazing fact that there are only three main syntactic strategies for making sentences longer: connective, subordinative, or adjectival (and combinations of these three strategies). Given the following six brief sentences, compose one sentence that incorporates all of their underlying propositions by employing connective strategy. Compose one sentence that incorporates all underlying propositions by employing subordinative strategy. Compose one sentence that incorporates all underlying propositions by employing adjectival strategy. Then, mix and match the three strategies to produce the best-sounding sentence you can craft that incorporates the propositions underlying the six brief sentences. Here are the sentences for you to work with: (1) The boy sat down at the table. (2) The boy was young. (3) The boy was out of breath from running. (4) The boy flopped down into his chair. (5) The table was made of heavy oak. (6) The table was covered with steaming dishes of food.

The Rhythm of Cumulative Syntax

T
his is the chapter I've been waiting for, the one where I get to introduce the structure of cumulative sentences, the syntax at the very heart of my approach to teaching writing. Of course, it's misleading to say that I'm about to introduce you to the cumulative syntax since I've been peppering my discussion of the sentence with references to cumulatives and with examples of what they can do. If I haven't yet managed to clearly establish the form these sentences take, I bet I have managed to alert your ears to their characteristic rhythms. Remember two of the cumulative sentences I've previously cited:

He went to speak to Mrs. Bean, tiny among the pillows, her small toothless mouth open like an “O,” her skin stretched thin and white over her bones, her huge eye-sockets and eyes in a fixed, infant-like stare, and her sparse white hair short and straggling over her brow.

They slept, the man simply collapsing on the bed, the woman first seeing what TV channels were available.

Here's a breathlessly fast new example from Ernest Hemingway:

George was coming down in the telemark position, kneeling, one leg forward and bent, the other trailing, his sticks hanging like some insect's thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow, and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow.

Here's a chillingly matter-of-fact example from Faulkner's “Barn Burning”:

His father struck him with the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horse fly, his voice still without heat or anger.

And a great description of a laugh from Don DeLillo:

He crossed his arms on his midsection, bent against the wall, laughing. It was a staccato laugh, building on itself, broadening in the end to a breathless gasp, the laughter that marks a pause in the progress of the world, the laughter we hear once in twenty years.

I love the sound of these sentences. I love the stop-and-go rhythms they set up with each syntactic step they take, moving us forward, preparing our ears for what will come next, just as they add to our knowledge of what came before. And these examples contain rhythms within rhythms, setting up parallels and repetitions, balancing sound against sound, not so much the product of conscious choice so much as the natural benefit of the cumulative syntax, itself a rhythm so powerful that it encourages us to find other rhythms within it.

After a while, you can almost hear these rhythms coming, knowing that a free modifying phrase starting with a participle, usually an
-ing
form of a verb, might come next, or an adverb, such as an
-ly
word, or a phrase started with a possessive pronoun,
his
or
her
or
its
, or a phrase that backtracks, picking up and repeating a word from the base clause before adding new information. In this way, we get cumulative rhythms such as:

The chef prepared the fish, carefully, stuffing it with wild rice, sautéing it briefly, its sweet aroma blending smoothly with the other enticing odors in the kitchen, the fish becoming more than merely food, ascending to the status of art.

Work with cumulative sentences and soon their rhythms become seductive, urging us to keep adding modifying phrases, their very sound reminding us of the limitless detail and explanation we can add to each sentence we write. That we now know so much about the cumulative syntax is a tribute to the pioneering work of Francis Christensen, an English professor at the University of Southern California who, in the 1960s, started looking at the way professional writers wrote. Christensen, who died in 1970, was an incredibly influential rhetorician, and his impact on the teaching of writing has been profound.

Francis Christensen: Father of the Cumulative Sentence

Much of Christensen's influence can be traced back to a single essay, “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence,” first published in
College Composition and Communication
back in 1963, and then republished in Christensen's collection of essays
Notes Toward a New Rhetoric: Six Essays for Teachers
, published in 1967. What so distinguished Christensen's approach to teaching writing was first, the belief that writing should really matter, and second, that writing improves most obviously and most quickly when we add information to our sentences in free modifiers, following or surrounding a base clause.

When I say that Christensen thought that writing really mattered, I mean that he saw sentences as means to a crucial end, much more important than clarity or effectiveness. As he put it:

The end is to enhance life—to give the self (the soul) body by wedding it to the world, to give the world life by wedding it to the self. Or, more simply, to teach to see, for that, as Conrad maintained, is everything.

His second, and more instrumental, belief was that traditional writing instruction had missed the point by advocating the subordinate clause and the complex sentence, and that “we should concentrate instead on the sentence modifiers, or free modifiers.”

Equally important to his approach to teaching writing was his concern with sound. As he noted:

[T]he rhythm of good modern prose comes about equally from the multiple-tracking of coordinate constructions and the downshifting and backtracking of free modifiers.

What a great description, “downshifting and backtracking of free modifiers.” If you'll think back to those cumulative sentences we considered just a moment ago, you can hear that their rhythm is indeed one of downshifting and backtracking. The free modifiers point back to the base clause and shift down to a greater level of detail or specificity. They backtrack by picking up and expanding on some aspect of the base clause, giving the sentence, as Christensen points out, “a flowing and ebbing movement, advancing to a new position and then pausing to consolidate it.” His words illustrate the rhythmic wave action they describe.

Christensen seemed to have found inspiration for his approach to the cumulative sentence in a little-known essay by the novelist and educator John Erskine. A longtime professor of literature at Columbia, Erskine had been largely responsible for the development of Columbia's signature humanities course, a great books course that has been the model for many general education literature courses across the country. In 1946, Erskine had contributed an essay, “The Craft of Writing,” to a collection of essays titled
Twentieth Century English
, edited by William S. Knickerbocker.

In his essay Erskine struck a note that served as the foundation for Christensen's theory of the cumulative sentence. Almost as a throwaway observation, Erskine suggested what he felt was a well-known but little discussed secret of writing:

The principle is this: When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed.

Erskine then noted that while grammar loosely concedes that “speech is a process of addition,” it then confuses things by making it seem that the substantive (noun), since it can stand alone, is more important than the adjective; that the verb is more important than the adverb; that the main clause is more important than the subordinate. Not so, wrote Erskine:

What you wish to say is found not in the noun but in what you add to qualify the noun. The noun is only a grappling iron to hitch your mind to the reader's. The noun by itself adds nothing to the reader's information; it is the name of something he knows already, and if he does not know it, you cannot do business with him. The noun, the verb, and the main clause serve merely as a base on which meaning will rise. The modifier is the essential part of any sentence.

In a wonderfully sly swipe at those writing gurus who put all their weight behind omitting all modifiers and confining themselves to nouns, pronouns, and verbs, Erskine also noted that tombstones give us our best examples of the “omit needless words” style.

Christensen's Four Principles for Cumulative Sentences

From Erskine's observation about the primacy of modifiers, Christensen developed four principles for understanding and writing cumulative sentences, and he emphasized that these principles were intended as a heuristic, as a prompt to the writer to inspire more effective writing, rather than as rules for writing that was simply utilitarian and error-free. In this way, he saw his approach to the cumulative sentence as a generative rhetoric, a means of spurring on and producing better sentences.

His first principle is that composition is essentially a process of addition. To a base clause, such as “They turned on the radio,” we add information, such as “ceaselessly turning the dial back and forth, trying to find a clear station, hoping for some news of the election.”

The second principle is that the information we add to sentences in modifying phrases gives the sentence a direction of modification or a direction of movement. As Christensen explains:

The main clause, which may or may not have a sentence modifier before it, advances the discussion, but the additions move backward, as in this clause, to modify the statement of the main clause or more often, to explicate or exemplify it so that the sentence has a flowing and ebbing movement, advancing to a new position and then pausing to consolidate it, leaping and lingering as the popular ballad does.

This principle of direction of modification has sometimes been suggested by others who use the term “left-branching sentence” to describe modification that comes to the left of or before the main clause, or “right-branching sentence” to describe modification that comes to the right of or after the main clause. In the left-branching sentence, the movement of modification is forward. In the right-branching sentence, it is backward. The cumulative sentence makes good use of both movements, but the cumulative sentences Christensen focuses the most attention on have modifiers that generally point or move backward. As he puts it:

The additions stay with the same idea, probing its bearings and implications, exemplifying it or seeking an analogy or metaphor for it, or reducing it to details. Thus the mere form of the sentence generates ideas. It serves the needs of both the writer and the reader, the writer by compelling him to examine his thought, the reader by letting him into the writer's thought.

I'd explain this a bit differently, noting that the cumulative form urges the writer to give more information to the reader, and it suggests to the reader that the writer is doing her or his best to make things as clear and as satisfying as possible. This is the syntax that sends the signal that the writer is doing her or his level best to communicate fully and effectively, trying harder than other writers.

The third principle is that cumulative sentences tend to develop by downshifting through increasingly detailed or specific levels of generality or levels of abstraction. I have previously noted that every word in a sentence is chosen from an imaginary vertical or paradigmatic axis, along which each word is more precise than a number of alternate choices above it on the ladder of abstraction, and less precise than choices below it. Cumulative sentences tend to extend this principle to the entire sentence, usually modifying the base clause with a phrase that gives it more precision, and then frequently downshifting once again to a second-level modifying phrase that adds precision to the first one. As Christensen explains this process:

With the main clause stated, the forward movement of the sentence stops, the writer shifts down to a lower level of generality or abstraction or to singular terms, and goes back over the same ground at this lower level.

We can see how this principle operates in a sentence where the base clause introduces a compound subject, and subsequent modifying clauses break it down into its constituent parts, as in: “They sat down, the young man cautiously, as if he might decide not to sit at all, the young woman hurriedly, as if this were something she wanted to finish as quickly as possible.” Or we can see it in a sentence in which each new layer—remember that each new layer or modifying phrase can be thought of as a step the sentence takes—refines the information of the preceding step: “This room looks like a disaster area, its walls pocked with holes, holes that suggest the room was the site of a violent fight, a fight in which sledgehammers were the weapons of choice.”

One of the virtues of the cumulative sentence is that the logical connections between or among its base clause and modifying phrases can easily be seen and understood. Using a rough form of diagramming to indicate the logic or modifying relationships of sentence levels, with the base clause always the first level indicated with a (1) and subsequent levels numbered
n
+ 1, with
n
being the number of the clause or phrase that the cumulative phrase modifies, we might indicate the logical relationships in a cumulative sentence as follows:

(1) A lamp was burning on the table, (BASE CLAUSE)

(2) flickering slightly, (PHRASE MODIFYING THE BASE CLAUSE)

(2) casting a dim light on the shabby room, (PHRASE MODIFYING THE BASE CLAUSE)

(2) leaving the corners dark, (PHRASE MODIFYING THE BASE CLAUSE)

(2) providing no comfort to the lonesome inhabitant of the shelter, (PHRASE MODIFYING THE BASE CLAUSE)

(2) promising him nothing. (PHRASE MODIFYING THE BASE CLAUSE)

And here's how a slightly more complicated sentence that adds a phrase that points not to the base clause but to the preceding level (2) phrase would be indicated: