Building Great Sentences (7 page)

(1) A lamp was burning on the table,

(2) flickering slightly,

(3) the flicker animating a dance of shadows on the wall.

We can extend this conceptual diagramming to indicate the logical relationships of the steps in longer and more detailed sentences, always allowing us to see how the modifying phrases in the sentence work together:

(1) Cumulative sentences can take any number of forms,

(2) detailing both frozen or static scenes and moving processes,

(2) their insistent rhythm always asking for another modifying phrase,

(3) allowing us to achieve ever-greater degrees of specificity and precision,

(4) a process of focusing the sentence in much the same way a movie camera can focus and refocus on a scene,

(5) zooming in for a close-up to reveal almost microscopic detail,

(5) panning back to offer a wide-angle panorama,

(5) offering new angles or perspectives from which to examine a scene or consider an idea.

I'll say more about this method of diagramming at the end of the chapter.

Christensen's fourth principle is that cumulative sentences add
texture
to the propositional content of a sentence. Greater texture or density of information is one of the most important keys to better writing. The plain style that has been the goal of so much writing instruction is a style that devalues texture in favor of simplicity. Christensen sadly notes that most student writing is “thin—even threadbare” and stresses that students (and, I might add, all writers) need to develop variety in the length and rhythm of their sentences and strive for greater specific detail and explanation.

The cumulative sentence encourages us to do exactly this. Christensen points to a striking example of this kind of texture in a magnificent sentence by Loren Eiseley that warns of unbridled atomic power, developing that warning through six memorable levels of generality, producing a sentence that unfolds in eleven distinct steps:

(1) It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature,

(2) a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster,

(3) consuming flesh, stones, soil, minerals,

(3) sucking down the lightning,

(3) wrenching power from the atom,

(4) until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned out in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature,

(5) something instead which is loose and knocking at the world's heart,

(5) something demonic and no longer planned—

(6) escaped it may be—

(6) spewed out of nature,

(6) contending in a final giant's game against its master.

And there you have it, a generative rhetoric of the cumulative sentence, based on just four principles: addition, movement, levels of generality, and texture.

Consider the cumulative syntax in the terms of the steps suggested by Josephine Miles, and we get the idea of a sentence that takes a new step with each modifying phrase we add, that adds a new level or degree of specificity or clarity with each of these steps. Consequently, we can start thinking about improving the effectiveness of our sentences just by adding a single new modifying level, by making our sentences more effective still with each new modifying level we add beyond that.

Christensen said of his own teaching:

I try in narrative sentences to push to level after level, not just two or three, but four, five, or six, even more as far as the students' powers of observation will take them. I want them to become sentence acrobats, to dazzle by their syntactic dexterity.

I couldn't agree more. What a great goal for writers, “to become sentence acrobats, to dazzle by their syntactic dexterity.” And what makes me such a fan of the cumulative syntax is that this goal can be achieved so easily, just by practicing the basic moves of the cumulative sentence until we internalize its rhythms and start to produce them without thinking. In the next chapters, I'll be focusing specifically on those rhythms, on the basic moves we can make with cumulatives. For now, I just want to leave you with their sound and with what their modifying logic looks like. I want to stress how easy this syntax makes it for us to add information to our sentences, to make them longer, and to make them more satisfying as we do so.

The Logic of Cumulative Sentence Levels

Fewer and fewer of us have been trained to diagram sentences in the traditional fashion requiring all sorts of horizontal and vertical and diagonal lines forming a grid onto which we map the words in a sentence. While those diagrams can help writers understand the parts of a sentence, they do not address the way the sentence unfolds in time. The informal diagramming scheme I mentioned a few pages ago reveals the logical relationships among the several steps a sentence may take as it develops through time. It isn't necessary for writers of cumulative sentences to master this conceptual diagramming, but it can help the writer see the modifying logic of the several steps and/or levels of specific information a cumulative sentence may be built from. The following examples are sentences my students have composed over the years, diagrammed to show the relationship of their levels, each level after the base clause a cumulative modifying phrase. They are sentences of which any writer should be proud.

(1) He stepped up to home plate,

(2) the chalk lines of the batter's box barely visible,

(2) the batter wiping the sweat from his face,

(2) taking one last deep breath of the crisp autumn air,

(2) a look of determination in his eyes,

(2) the team's fans rhythmically chanting his name,

(3) knowing that he represented the last ray of hope for their team.

Here's another:

(1) We navigated Nashville's back roads,

(2) whooping ourselves hoarse up and over the hills,

(2) feeling our weight alternately light and heavy as we shifted in our seats,

(3) leaning right and left as the roads forked,

(2) wondering if we would ever escape the shade of the trees,

(2) laughing at the clock,

(2) longing for the North Star.

And one more, a cascade of modifying participial phrases, each advancing a new proposition, each telling us more about a high-stakes phone call:

(1) She called him,

(2) picking up the phone,

(2) hoping he would be home,

(2) scared of what he would say,

(2) praying that they would work things out,

(2) wishing he'd called her first,

(2) trying to get a grip on her emotions.

A slightly more complicated sentence can even better indicate how this cumulative diagramming can make clear the relationship of the parts of a sentence whose base clause has as its subject a plural pronoun:

(1) They sat down at the table,

(2) he resignedly slumping into the straight-backed chair,

(3) his tired face a picture of dejection,

(3) his hands shaking uncontrollably,

(2) she stiffly taking her seat with exaggerated formality,

(3) her eyes cold and hard and locked on his,

(3) her thin-lipped smile at once triumphant and condescending,

(2) the table piled high with stock reports and financial statements,

(3) its surface completely covered with documents of desperation,

(3) its jumble of information now completely useless,

(2) the overall scene suggesting an abandoned battleground.

And there's a wonderful added attraction to using cumulatives in our writing: they build upon each other, setting up an insistent rhythm among, as well as within, sentences. One good cumulative sentence frequently leads to another—and then still another. Several cumulative sentences in a row feed on each other, building on each other's rhythms and specificity. “Clumps” or “clusters” of cumulative sentences establish a sense in the reader that the writer is committed both to offering as much detail and explanation as is needed and to doing so in a rhythmic ebb and flow that makes that information easy to follow and easy to understand. Cumulative sentences flow together, calling attention to the way in which they anticipate a reader's possible questions, assuring the reader that the writer is determined to communicate as fully and as effectively as possible.

Next Steps

Single out several sentences you have written in previous writing projects or choose several sentences from an article or essay or novel that interests you. For each of the sentences you have selected, turn the period at the end of the sentence into a comma and then craft a cumulative modifying phrase that adds new detail or explanation to the original sentence or that answers a question someone might reasonably want to ask about it. The point of this exercise is to show how adding even a single cumulative modifying phrase to the end of a sentence can make it more informative, more satisfying, more effective. To come at this point from a different direction, see if you can find several cumulative sentences in a magazine article you've read and think about what the sentence would lose if you were to cut off the cumulative modifying phrase or phrases and turn the comma that introduced it or them into a period that ends the sentence.

I direct my Prose Style students to a
New Yorker
short story by Don DeLillo to help them understand this point. DeLillo favors cumulative syntax more than any other contemporary writer I know and his “Midnight in Dostoevsky,” published in the November 30, 2009,
New Yorker
is filled with interesting cumulative sentences.

Coordinate, Subordinate, and
Mixed Cumulative Patterns

N
ot only do cumulative sentences make it easier and more satisfying for readers to process what we write, but they also can help us figure out what we should write next. The cumulative syntax functions a bit like Jiminy Cricket in Disney's
Pinocchio
. Jiminy perches on Pinocchio's shoulder and gives him advice about what he should do. I admit it's a stretch to compare sentence syntax with a bug in a movie, but, once we start writing cumulative sentences, each level can suggest to us that we may need to do more—that we may need to add detail or explanation, another modifying phrase, to make clear exactly what we want to say. It is in this sense that our understanding of the way cumulative sentences work can invite us to add at least one more modifying phrase to the sentence we are writing. And this is why the cumulative sentence is generative or heuristic, always presenting us with the opportunity to be more precise, offer more detail, try another way of explaining. Or, as I might put this in a cumulative sentence (without Jiminy's direct intervention): the cumulative is a generative syntax in the sense that it encourages writers to add information to their sentences, relying on free modifying phrases after the base clause, each new phrase a step forward for the sentence, each new phrase sharpening the sentence by adding new details or offering clarification or explanation for propositions advanced in the base clause or preceding modifying phrase. (And, for the record, my nose didn't grow a bit!)

I like to think of each new modifying phrase as answering a question that a reader might have about the preceding clause or phrase. If we start with a base clause “He was afraid,” we might well expect a reader to wonder who he is and why he might be afraid. Let's add some free modifying phrases to answer those questions: “He was afraid, a little boy separated from his mother in a large department store, fearing that he would never find her, feeling lost and abandoned in a world of strange and scary faces.” Most of us start thinking about our sentences with fairly simple subject-verb base clauses or kernel sentences that might not be as stark as “He was afraid” but are very rarely as developed as “He was afraid, a little boy separated from his mother in a large department store, fearing that he would never find her, feeling lost and abandoned in a world of strange and scary faces.”

Before looking at more cumulative sentences in action, we need to backtrack just a bit and be sure we understand a few technical aspects of cumulative syntax. I'm going to try to keep grammatical descriptions to a minimum here, but I will need to review some grammar to help us distinguish cumulative sentences from those that are not cumulative. Remember the basics: the cumulative sentence gets its name from the way it accumulates information, gathering new details as it goes, like a snowball that gets bigger and bigger and bigger as you roll it through snow. To write a cumulative sentence, all you have to do is turn the period at the end of one of your sentences into a comma, and start adding modifiers. As you add modifying details, you will bring your writing into focus, making your point sharper and sharper, your meaning more and more clear.

Clauses, Phrases, Verbs, and Verbals

Now, just a bit of grammar. A cumulative sentence has two main parts. The first part is called the base clause. A base clause contains the sentence's main subject and main verb. A base clause can be thought of as a short, boiled-down sentence. For example, “The boy laughed.” The verb in a base clause is called a finite verb. Verbs express an action or state of being. State-of-being verbs are also called linking verbs. An action verb expresses something that can be done. A linking verb points to more information. That is, it must be followed by another word that completes its information. True linking verbs include all forms of state-of-being verbs, and state-of-being verbs include all the forms of the verb
be
. These are heavily used in our writing, as in “He is,” “I am,” “We are,” “It was,” “They were,” “It has been,” “We might have been,” “I will become,” “It seems,” and so on.

Notice that none of the above combinations of a subject and a linking verb offer any really useful information. That's because each linking verb needs a verb complement that explains the specific nature of a particular state of being; thus, “He is hungry,” “I am eating,” “We are singing,” “It has been educational,” “I seem to have lost my billfold” and so on. Forms of state-of-being verbs are almost always linking verbs, although very rarely they can function independently, signaling being as existence, as in, “I think, therefore I am.”

But we also have a group of verbs that can either function as linking verbs, needing a complement to complete their meaning, or function independently as action verbs. The way they function in the sentence will determine whether they are action or linking verbs. There are too many of these multitasking verbs to list, but the category includes such verbs as
appear
, which can be used interchangeably with the linking verb
seem
or
fee
l
, which can be used in many cases where we might use the linking verb
am
: “I am sick” or “I feel sick” and so on.

A number of verbs in this category are very close to linking verbs in meaning. For example, verbs such as
remain
and
continue
clearly can refer to states of being, but can function independently as action verbs, as in “The building remains” or “The drama continues.” Action verbs also can be subdivided into those that need an object to complete their meaning and those that do not. If the verb requires or even if it just can be used with a direct object, we call it a transitive verb. If the verb cannot take a direct object, we call it an intransitive verb.

Here are some examples: “The boy laughed”: action verb, intransitive. “The boy is tired”: linking verb. “The boy kicked the ball”: action verb, transitive.

There are almost an infinite number of both kinds of verbs, and many verbs can function either intransitively, as in “He eats” or “He is eating,” or transitively, as in “He eats lasagna” or “He is eating lunch.” So much for the base clause.

Clauses and Phrases: How to Tell a Hawk from a Handsaw

The second part of a cumulative sentence consists of one or more modifying phrases. Unlike a clause, a phrase does not contain a subject and a verb, and it cannot stand alone as a sentence. Walk into a room and just utter a phrase such as “rolling in the snow,” and folks in the room will look at you strangely. (“Rolling” might be used as a verb in some contexts, as in “The boy was rolling the ball,” but if “rolling” is used as a modifier, as in “The boy fell down, rolling in the snow,” or as a noun, as in “Rolling snowballs is the first step in making a snow man,” we call “rolling” a
verbal.
Verbals are verb forms, such as participles or gerunds, where what might be a verb in other contexts functions as an adjective or noun.) Here are some examples of phrases that contain verbals: “his face turning red,” “a goofy-looking sixth-grader,” “head thrown back.” Most modifying phrases can be classified as participial phrases, gerund phrases, infinitive phrases, or prepositional phrases.

Four Kinds of Phrases

Participial phrases are particularly important for cumulative sentences, and we'll consider them more fully than the other kinds of phrases since the other kinds almost always appear in connection with or as components of larger participial phrases. Participial phrases contain one kind of verbal, a verb that has been turned into an adjective. For example:

The boy laughed, delighted by the joke.

The boy laughed, gasping for breath.

The boy laughed, tears of mirth streaming down his face.

The boy laughed, completely disrupting his math class.

The boy laughed, his face turning a bright red.

Now, for the second kind of phrase: Gerund phrases are somewhat similar to participial phrases, with the difference that they contain another kind of verbal, a verb that's been turned into a noun: “Eating ice cream too fast makes my forehead hurt,” “Eating ice cream too fast is something I try to avoid,” and “His ice cream eating proved to be his undoing.” In much the same way that a participle is a verb drained of power, a gerund is a verb with
-ing
added to turn it into a noun, using it as we use a noun to name a person, place, or thing. A gerund can be the subject of a sentence, the direct object of the verb in a sentence, a subject complement, or the object of a preposition.

Here are some examples. First of all, gerund as subject: “Cheating might become a habit.” Now, gerund as direct object: “They do not understand my cheating.” Gerund as subject complement: “My biggest problem is cheating.” Gerund as object of a preposition: “The coach chewed him out for cheating.” Gerunds can serve in cumulative modifying phrases as appositives—substitutes for previous nouns or pronouns—and they can serve in combination with participles, as in “Fainting having become something of a problem for troops in formation, the general tried to finish his inspection as quickly as possible.”

Now, infinitive phrases: “The boy wanted to run.” “Running is the problem to be overcome.” “To run or not to run was the question.” Infinitives function much like gerunds and frequently appear in cumulative modifying levels, accompanied by a participle: “Thinking he needed to find a job, the ex-superhero started scouring the want ads.”

Finally, prepositional phrases: “The boy fainted after finishing the race.” “The boy fainted in front of his parents.” “The boy fainted with no warning.” Common prepositions that begin prepositional phrases are
across
,
after
,
as
,
at
,
because of
,
before
,
between
,
by
,
for
,
from
,
in
,
in front of
,
in regard to
,
like
,
near
,
of
,
on
,
over
,
through
,
to
,
together with
,
under
,
until
,
up
, and
with
. While not technically adjectival free modifiers, prepositional phrases—particularly when surrounded by participial phrases—can function as sentence steps much like modifying phrases and can promote cumulative rhythm. The crucial point here is that all four kinds of phrases can appear as steps in cumulative sentences, but it is important to ensure that these phrases rely on verbals and not on unsubordinated active or passive verbs. We might think of verbals as verbs lite, or as verbs drained of their power to make anything happen, serving only to modify something or to function as a subordinate element in a larger phrasal structure. “Remembering that he needed to buy a ticket” subordinates the infinitive phrase “to buy” in a larger phrase, as “Looking under the cushion” subordinates the prepositional phrase “under the cushion.”

Back to participial phrases: Since participles are in effect adjectives made from verbs, participial phrases function in a sentence in all the ways an adjective might function, modifying nouns or pronouns. Participles that refer to ongoing actions or processes are called present participles. Participles that refer to past or completed actions or processes are called past participles. Present participles end in
-ing
. Past participles can take more forms, but generally are verbs that can function as verbals in their forms, ending in
-d
,
-ed
,
-en
,
-t
,
or
-n
, as in the words
confused
,
marked
,
eaten
,
dealt
, and
seen
. Here are some examples: “The girl jumped up from her desk, scattering her books and papers.”
Scattering
is a present participle. “The girl jumped up from her desk, startled by the bell.”
Startled
is a past participle. “The boy slumped to the floor, driven past his physical limits.” That's another past participle.

Modifying phrases may add information about the subject or the verb of the base clause or the object, if it contains an object, or they may simply add to our understanding of the entire base clause. For example, “The boy kicked the ball, hitting it squarely with the toe of his soccer shoe.” Another example: “The boy kicked the ball, a tattered and worn old football.” “The boy kicked the ball, grim determination clear in his every move.” “The boy kicked the ball, his friends yelling their encouragement.”

Base clause plus modifying phrases makes a cumulative sentence, and we get as a result something like:

The boy laughed, shaking uncontrollably, obviously delighted by the joke, his face turning bright red, tears of mirth streaming down his face, gasping for breath, completely disrupting his math class.

This cumulative sentence packs a lot of information. Indeed, if we unpack its underlying propositions, we see that it does the work of at least seven different sentences. Because the cumulative sentence packs so much detail and because it is easy to follow, professional writers use it very frequently. In fact, it has been estimated that professional writers put their modifiers at the end of their sentences two-thirds of the time.

Caveat Scriptor! Let the Writer Beware (Just a Little)

A clause and a modifying phrase are the two basic grammatical components of a cumulative sentence, but I've found that many students in my Prose Style class at Iowa are not clear about the distinction between the two. Indeed, far too frequently I am discovering that my English majors not only have forgotten this distinction, but also may have never been taught the difference between a clause and a phrase. That distinction is crucial, since students trying to write cumulatives for the first time often produce comma splices, following the base clause with a comma, but then adding another base clause rather than a modifying phrase. Thus, instead of getting the cumulative sentence “The boy laughed, his face turning bright red” we get something like “The boy fainted, his face turned bright red,” which is called a comma splice because a comma is simply not a strong enough mark of punctuation to join together two base clauses. The difference between “his face turned bright red” and “his face turning bright red” becomes clear when we remember that “his face turned bright red” could stand alone as a sentence in its own right, a sure sign that it is a clause, while “his face turning bright red” cannot stand alone as a sentence, a sure sign that it is a phrase.