Building Great Sentences

A PLUME BOOK

BUILDING GREAT SENTENCES

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

BROOKS LANDON
is Herman J. and Eileen S. Schmidt Professor in the University of Iowa English Department. He is a former chair of the department and a former director of the General Education Literature Program. His books include
Understanding Thomas Berger
and
Science Fiction After 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars
and he has written widely on science fiction, science fiction film, and contemporary American fiction.

•••

How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

BROOKS LANDON

A PLUME BOOK

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

Copyright © The Teaching Company LLC, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Excerpt from
The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume III: 1923-1928
, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf
  published in six volumes. Letters copyright © 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. Published by Mariner Books and Hogarth Press. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, The Random House Group Limited, and The Society of Authors, as the literary representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence” by Francis Christensen from
Notes Toward a New Rhetoric, Third Edition
, by Francis and Bonniejean Christensen, edited by Don Stewart. Copyright © Don Stewart, 2007. By permission of Don Stewart.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Landon, Brooks.

Building great sentences : how to write the kinds of sentences you love to read / Brooks Landon.

pages cm

“A PLUME BOOK.”

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-61402-0

1. English language—Sentences—Study and Teaching. 2. English language—Rhetoric—Study and Teaching. I. Title.

PE1441.L334 2013

808'.042—dc23 2012051011

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

C
an't begin to suggest ways of
building
great sentences without lots of examples of what
built
great sentences look like. So my first debt is to the writers beyond naming and numbering whose sentences have rewarded readers over the centuries and have intrigued and inspired me over the years. Some of those marvelous writers have been my students in a Prose Style class I've been offering at Iowa in one form or another for thirty-four years, and I thank my students for all they have taught me. One in particular, Nathan Kreuter, is now Professor Kreuter and is adding his insights to our appreciation and understanding of prose style. My debt to colleagues in the University of Iowa English Department is huge. In this book I detail my gratitude to Carl Klaus, but I need to mention a debt that is harder to detail: everything that I believe about writing has been immeasurably influenced by Paul Diehl. Ed Folsom, Garrett Stewart, Miriam Gilbert, and Bonnie Sunstein have been inspirations, setting standards I strive to meet, too often falling short. I remain stunned by the vision of The Teaching Company and thank its fine professionals for getting this ball rolling. Without Becky Cole's steady guiding hand, fine judgment, and saintly patience at Plume, this manuscript would never have been wrestled into shape. And, finally, a shout-out to Jonathan Lethem, who
gets
Thomas Berger and crafts some pretty mean sentences himself!

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

 

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE:
A Sequence of Words

CHAPTER TWO:
Grammar and Rhetoric

CHAPTER THREE:
The Primacy of Propositions

CHAPTER
FOUR:
How Sentences Grow

CHAPTER FIVE:
The Rhythm of Cumulative Syntax

CHAPTER SIX:
Coordinate, Subordinate, and Mixed Cumulative Patterns

CHAPTER SEVEN:
Cumulative Tweaks and Tighten-Ups

CHAPTER EIGHT:
Prompts of Comparison and Speculation

CHAPTER NINE:
The Riddle of Prose Rhythm

CHAPTER TEN:
Suspensive Syntax: The Rhythm of Delay

CHAPTER ELEVEN:
Degrees of Suspensiveness, Significance of Surprise

CHAPTER TWELVE:
Balanced Sentences and Balanced Forms

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN:
The Rhythm of Threes

CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
Long Sentences and Master Sentences

CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
Sentences as Keys to the Gift of Style

 

Index

W
e live in a world of words. Digital media inundate us with language in a twenty-four/seven barrage never possible in the world of printer's ink. Constant Web updates, blogs, e-mails, instant messaging, tweets, Facebook comments, and a cascade of electronic texts give us expanded opportunities to share our writing with others. Even in the age of Skype and FaceTime we continue to interact with others through writing. More and more it is important that we represent ourselves to the world through writing that is effective—clear, precise, satisfyingly informative writing that reveals the individuality and sophistication of our thinking. And we cannot be effective writers without writing effective sentences.

Whatever the medium, print or digital, our basic unit of communication is the sentence. Good sentences are alive. We experience them in time, and we react to their unfolding as they twist and turn, challenging us, teasing us, surprising us, and sometimes boring or confusing us as we read them. This book will explore the ways we can make our sentences better. To accomplish that we need to understand how making our sentences longer or shorter can make them more effective, more informative, more satisfying. We need to understand how taking control of building and trimming our sentences can improve our writing.

Our goals will be to learn about how sentences work, what they do, and how we can think and talk about them in ways that will help both our own writing and our understanding of prose style. We will stretch our sense of all the things a sentence can be or do. We will explore the mysterious concept of “style” to discover what style does and does not mean. This is a book in which we will dance with language, not a book in which we will trudge toward remedial correctness.

Dancing with language can be a rowdy affair. We might wish this dance had the precision, rules, and predictability of a tango, but it probably has much more in common with freestyle dancing that is more spontaneous and more creative, open to new steps and encouraging the reinterpretation of old ones. When the writer dances with language, toes do sometimes get stepped on as rules are broken. Of course, in dancing, as in writing, we need some ideas of what the rules are before we can break them. Before this dancing metaphor runs away with me, however, I better start talking as the writing teacher I am, rather than the dancing instructor I most certainly am not.

I'm no writing guru with mystical formulas for success. I
am
both a longtime student of writing theory and a writing teacher with over thirty years of experience. During that time, I've both learned a lot about writing and passed along what I've learned to several generations of students. What I believe and teach about writing is more thoughtful than theoretical, based more on what I've found helpful to my students in the classroom than on strict adherence to any single philosophy or theory of composition. My approach to teaching writing does, however, grow out of the three broad categories of writing instruction that are focused on the sentence.

At the heart of my approach is Francis Christensen's belief in the value of cumulative sentences built by adding modifying phrases to base clauses or “kernel” sentences. I expand Christensen's advocacy of cumulative sentences by identifying and explaining the value of a range of syntactical and rhetorical patterns, forms, or schemes I ask my students to imitate until they learn how to adapt these patterns to their own uses. In trusting the value of imitation as a basis for rather than as the opposite of creativity, I am championing a classical approach to writing I believe remains highly effective. The third component of my approach to writing incorporates many of the assumptions of sentence-combining strategies popular in the 1970s. I'll say more about the nature and history of those three sentence-based approaches in my final chapter, after you've had a chance to experience and try out some of my particular spin on their methods and assumptions. For now I want to assure you that my approach to building great sentences grows out of pedagogies of proven effectiveness and promotes ways of building better sentences that fine writers know and practice. In drawing from and finding ways to combine these three broad approaches to the sentence I also try to provide a better understanding of the ways in which our standards and “rules” for effective writing have changed over time—and continue to evolve.

No rules or formulas or mechanical protocols can prepare us for the infinite number of tasks our sentences must accomplish, but there are a number of basic strategies we can learn that help make our sentences more effective. I'm going to introduce you to a broad range of techniques, but a particular favorite of mine is the cumulative sentence, an especially useful syntax employed by professional writers and best understood in terms first laid out by composition theorist Francis Christensen back in the 1960s.

Before we can work with a specific syntax, we need to understand the basic principles that guide the creation and use of all sentences. Accordingly, this book will look closely and carefully at sentences from a number of different angles, starting with their underlying logic and moving through the reasons why we cannot separate the content of a sentence from its form, its meaning from its style. We will look at the ways sentences work, from the most basic kernel sentences that are nothing more than a subject joined with a verb, to the most elaborate and extended master sentences, some stretching to lengths of more than one hundred words.

In examining the ways in which sentences work and why they sometimes don't work, we will also encounter, understand, and possibly even master some of the secrets of prose style. Everyone who writes about prose style advances a particular view of it, and each view reflects the personal values and preferences of that particular writer. Yet somehow we generally agree that there is something called prose style. We generally agree on a number of aspects of writing that seem to have something to do with style, and we generally agree that there are some writers, ranging from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion to John Updike, Don DeLillo to Marilynne Robinson, who just seem to be better at it than others. When F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in
The Great Gatsby
, describing Daisy, “Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,' a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour,” who can doubt that we are in the hands of a great writer?

This book can't begin to explain all of the mysteries of prose style. Nor can it offer universally agreed-upon standards for writing that is great or even effective. What this book can do is look closely and carefully at sentences, the most important building blocks of prose, the foundation of written communication, and the essential units of prose style. I hope you will join me in considering and celebrating the magic of the sentence as you think about and try out some of the writing strategies I suggest in this book. All of my ideas about sentences may not fit your goals for your own writing, but I hope you will find my discussion useful even when you do not agree with some of its parts. My ultimate goal, you see, is not to get you to agree with me about a specific view of writing but to encourage you to join me in the much larger and more important enterprise of exploring the power and promise of language.

Next Steps

At the end of each chapter in
Building Great Sentences
I'll suggest some writing exercises that may help illustrate the ideas and methods explored in the chapter. Writing is a purpose-driven activity and most of our day-to-day writing purposes call on us to construct something longer than an individual sentence. Yet, in this book my advice will rarely be about units of prose larger than the sentence. The classic advice given to backpackers trying to limit the weight they have to carry is “Pay attention to the ounces, and the pounds take care of themselves.” Something very similar is true of writing: “Pay attention to your sentences, and most other writing problems take care of themselves.” Nevertheless, in my Prose Style class at Iowa I do suggest to my students that they craft their responses to specific syntactic assignments as if the individual sentences were part of a larger writing project. I suggest they imagine that they are writing their autobiography or a description of how they mastered a skill or learned a lesson. They might imagine they are writing a profile of someone who had a significant impact on their lives. You may have an actual writing project to which you can direct your sentence experiments or you may actually prefer to craft your sentences with no connections among them other than the range of your imagination. Most of the exercises I will suggest as Next Steps involve so many variables that they will not elicit sentences that are right or wrong. But they will help you understand how sentences work—and what can make them great.