Building Great Sentences (23 page)

Notwithstanding the lyric exuberance of Marguerite Young's celebration of the long sentence, I'm reluctant to adopt her terminology: as richly descriptive as is her metaphor of the dragnet, recent years have made us more and more aware that fishermen's nets also bring in more than a few dolphins and endangered sea turtles, unintended victims of an undiscriminating process. I'd prefer to continue to call very long sentences and sentences that function in remarkable ways
master sentences
, a nod at once to their originality and then again to their control. Master sentences stick out. They demand attention. They slow readers down and urge them to consider the writer's purpose and skill.

Master sentences exist at the opposite end of the syntactical continuum from kernel sentences. They tend to be much longer than readers normally expect, although, again, length is not in itself a sign of either a master sentence or a writer's mastery. Once more, I'll invoke that old cigarette ad: “It's not how long you make it, it's how you make it long.” Master sentences are by nature loners—when they form a crowd, they lose most of their impact and can actually reach a point of diminished returns, where they signal a writer's weakness rather than strength. In this sense, a master sentence that works will always be a form of a suspensive sentence: if it manages to hold the reader's interest to the end, and it's a sentence that clearly is invested in extending itself, there must be some sense that the sentence still has something important to disclose or that there is some good reason for it to keep going.

The end point of a master sentence may not be a surprise in the classic sense of coming down to the very last word before the sense or purpose of the sentence is clear, but there is usually some sense of discovery inherent in the fact that the sentence has extended itself to such a degree—whether to suggest a process that involves twists and turns, reversals and new directions, or to parallel or suggest the duration of a process that itself does not easily end, or to suggest a situation involving complexities that cannot easily be boiled down to a clear sense of the relationships among underlying propositions.

Consider this master sentence from Loren Eiseley, which we've previously discussed for its cumulative structure:

It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soil, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned out in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world's heart, something demonic and no longer planned—escaped it may be—spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant's game against its master.

The ninety-one words of this sentence narrate a process in which man, a part of nature, wrestles with the natural order, unleashing the atom, another part of nature, to act in a way possibly never anticipated, a way that ultimately may mean the end of nature itself. This process is characterized by the metaphor of a whirlpool, sucking down everything it touches, spiraling toward some apocalyptic endpoint, the spiral itself invoked by and embodied in the cumulative phrases that spin this sentence through six levels of generality to a dramatic final image of conflict between nature and atomic power set free by man.

Or consider this master sentence by Thomas Berger, one of many in his distinctive novels, but noteworthy for its vernacular tone, a reminder that the American colloquial style frequently produces sentences that are stories in themselves. In this sentence from
The Return of Little Big Man
, Jack Crabb has just been reunited with his faithful dog, Pard, whom he has not seen for several years and feared dead:

Now if you know only the kind of pets ladies keep indoors, or even sporting hounds, and so on, you might expect old Pard to make a greater display than he done when he seen me for the first time in more than three years, having tracked me over hundreds of miles, but just as he weren't the type to bear a grudge, thank goodness, he had lived the sort of life in which the interests of survival tended to hold down emotional demonstrations, in which he reminded me of myself, so we never hugged or anything, but I was real glad to see him, a feeling which alternated with amazement at his feat, which exceeded anything I had heard of at the time, though in the many years since, now and again dogs have somehow followed their families at greater distances on foot while the humans used the motorcar, so when I tell about Pard it might be easier to believe than the experiences I relate concerning historical personages, though all are equally true.

I've previously suggested that a sentence functions like a hand. A master sentence is like the very remarkable hand of a skilled surgeon or painter or magician, a hand capable of performing extraordinary tasks, capable of forming itself into shapes dictated by the need of the moment, distinguished by what it does. A hand can point, grasp, stroke, make a fist. It can wave, pinch, scratch, its functioning determined by the occasion, by what needs to be done that a hand can do.
The master sentence is always doing more than needs to be done.
Apart from the contextual purpose it serves, conveying information as it creates an impact, a master sentence is also always a reminder to readers that they are in the hands of a skilled writer, someone who wants to direct their attention to matters of language and style as well as to information.

What Master Sentences Can Do

While attempts to classify master sentences may be doomed to failure, there are some functions or patterns we can observe and keep in the backs of our minds for situations in our own writing where those functions or patterns may be useful.

Some master sentences simply seem to meander, almost marking time, waiting for something else to occur to the writer or to happen in the prose:

To the great delight of Sid Liftoff, who'd known her since their days as regulars at Musso and Frank's, and a senior gaffer who'd worked with Hub, Sasha had come wheeling into the valet parking at the Vineland Palace in a Cadillac the size of a Winnebago and painted some vivid fingernail polish color, alighting and sweeping into the lobby a step and a half ahead of her companion, Derek, considerably younger and paler, with a buzz cut that nearly matched the car, an English accent, and a guitar case he was never seen to open, picked up on the highway between here and the Grand Canyon, where she'd parted from her current romantic interest, Tex Wiener, after an epic screaming exchange right at the edge, and on impulse decided to attend that year's Traverse-Becker get-together up in Vineland, leaving Tex on foot among the still-bouncing echoes of their encounter, which had brought tourist helicopters nudging in for a closer look, distracted ordinarily surefooted mules on the trail below into quick shuffle-ball-changes along the rim of Eternity, proceeded through a sunset that was the closest we get to seeing God's own jaundiced and bloodshot eyeball, looking back at us without much enthusiasm, then on into the night arena of a parking lot so dangerously tilted that even with your hand brake set and your wheels chocked, your short could still end up a mile straight down, its trade-in value seriously diminished.

That from Thomas Pynchon's
Vineland.

Some master sentences seem to twist and turn like a snake, going through syntactical moves that we might call serpentine. Here is another sentence from Thomas Berger, this time from his first novel,
Crazy in Berlin
, also the first novel in his celebrated Reinhart series:

The ride on the new car Reinhart forgot even as it was in progress, for he had now reached that secondary state of inebriation in which the mind is one vast sweep of summer sky and there is no limit to the altitude a kite may go, the condition in which one can repair intricate mechanisms at other times mysterious, solve equations, craft epigrams, make otherwise invulnerable women, and bluff formidable men, when people say, “Why Reinhart!” and rivals wax bitter.

Some master sentences display an almost dogged sense of homing in on a final piece of information or a conclusion with radar-guided precision. Martin Luther King Jr. was a master of this technique, as we can see in his powerful “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” There, after three brief sentences that set the stage, Dr. King famously crafts a massive suspensive sentence of more than three hundred words that catalogues outrages against black Americans through ten blistering “when” phrases, culminating in a thunderous “then” clause that explains why African Americans find it difficult to wait for equality and justice. Of course, those ten delaying “when” phrases make Dr. King's readers wait, straining their patience and building their need for resolution, both paralleling and intensifying the message and impact of his famous sentence.

Nor do master sentences have to be long or particularly intricate, as we can see in Frank Deford's 1983 description of Howard Cosell:

He is not the one with the golden locks or the golden tan, but the one, shaking, sallow, and hunched, with a chin whose purpose is not to exist as a chin but only to fade so that his face may, as the bow of a ship, break the waves and not get in the way of that voice.

Or this from Joan Didion:

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

Some master sentences clearly build to a climax, using various delaying tactics to increase the suspensive power of what the sentence finally reveals, as we have previously seen in this almost paradigmatic master sentence from Joan Didion:

They set out to find it in accountants' ledgers and double-indemnity clauses and motel registers, set out to determine what might move a woman who believed in all the promises of the middle class—a woman who had been chairman of the Heart Fund and who always knew a reasonable little dressmaker and who had come out of the bleak wild of prairie fundamentalism to find what she imagined to be the good life—what should drive such a woman to sit on a street called Bella Vista and look out her new picture window into the empty California sun and calculate how to burn her husband alive in a Volkswagen.

Or as we can see in the celebrated climactic two-sentence sequence from Hemingway's story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”:

“He's dead in there,” Wilson said. “Good work,” and he turned to grip Macomber's hand and as they shook hands, grinning at each other, the gun-bearer shouted wildly and they saw him coming out of the brush sideways, fast as a crab, and the bull coming, nose out, mouth tight closed, blood dripping, massive head straight out, coming in a charge, his little pig eyes bloodshot as he looked at them. Wilson, who was ahead, was kneeling shooting, and Macomber, as he fired, unhearing his shot in the roaring of Wilson's gun, saw fragments like slate burst from the huge boss of the horns, and the head jerked, he shot again at the wide nostrils and saw the horns jolt again and fragments fly, and he did not see Wilson now and, aiming carefully, shot again with the buffalo's huge bulk almost on him and his rifle almost level with the on-coming head, nose out, and he could see the little wicked eyes and the head started to lower and he felt a sudden white-hot blinding flash explode inside his head and that was all he ever felt.

This master sentence from Joan Didion's
The Year of Magical Thinking
throws out all manner of detail before getting down to the business of delivering the stark news that her husband died. In Didion's expert hands, this delay is calculated to set the tone of disbelief and hard-won acceptance that is the primary message of the book. This is an example of magical thinking captured in prose that is reluctant to accept a harsh fact:

Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o'clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death.

Or, in another sentence we have previously seen from Leonard Woolf's autobiography:

Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing.

There is no formula for defining—much less writing—a master sentence, but we recognize one when we see it!

Next Steps

Inspired by the examples in this chapter, construct five master sentences. Yeah, right! Of course we cannot produce master sentences on demand and out of the context of a larger piece of writing. But we can remind ourselves that we are fully in command of a range of syntactic moves that we may call upon if the occasion seems to present itself for wowing our readers with a master sentence. Here are two challenges you should by now be more than ready to meet. First, as a kind of tour de force exercise for working with cumulatives, I want you to use this rhythm to construct a smooth-sounding cumulative sentence containing not less than one hundred words. Then construct a smooth-sounding suspensive sentence of not less than one hundred words. Now, there will be few occasions, if any, when you want to drop a sentence of one hundred words or more into your writing, but, if you craft such a sentence well, it will get attention. And if we can confidently write sentences of one hundred words or more that read smoothly and are easy to follow, imagine what a piece of cake it will be to write well-crafted sentences of fifty or seventy-five words!

Sentences as Keys to the Gift of Style

T
here's a fascinating article that has to do with the concerns of this book and which reminds me of something I really need to do before I wrap up a book with “Building Great Sentences” in its title. The article, by the late Robert J. Connors, a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and an influential expert in the area of rhetoric and composition, is starkly titled “The Erasure of the Sentence,” and it was published in the September 2000 issue of
College Composition and Communication
. The bio note, which I assume was written by Professor Connors himself, ends with the tongue-in-cheek description of the author “Now in his dotage, he strives vainly for crumbs of dignity as he watches everything he holds dear swept into the dustbin of history.” Tongue-in-cheek, yes, but I suspect there's more than a rueful grain or two of truth in that sentiment, as Professor Connors details in his article the disappearance of courses that focus primarily on the syntax of the sentence. Early on in his essay, Connors offers this beautifully balanced sentence summarizing developments in composition theory since the 1980s: “Some elements of the older field of composition teaching became approved and burgeoned, while others were tacitly declared dead ends: lore-based and therefore uninteresting, scientistic and therefore suspect, mechanistic and therefore destructive.” Reading that, I knew I was in good hands and in the presence of a kindred spirit.

The gist of this article is that sentence- or syntax-based approaches to writing have pretty much died out or been driven underground, despite their proven effectiveness, by larger theoretical currents in composition theory and by theory-centered developments in the broader field of English studies. I have more than a passing interest—as should you—in what Connors has to say.

Why Sentence-Based Instruction Works

Sentence-based pedagogies were much the rage when I was a graduate student in the 1970s, and Connors does a great job of describing both their rise and their subsequent fall. He divides writing instruction based on the sentence into three broad categories, starting with Christensen's advocacy of the benefits of the cumulative sentence, making Christensen a category unto himself. I have devoted significant portions of this book to Christensen's rhetoric of the cumulative sentence, so you are already familiar with its contours. The next category Connors identifies consists of writing approaches that have at their center the rather precise imitation of sentence patterns, forms, and schemes, and he mentions Edward P. J. Corbett's 1965 textbook,
Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student
, as a flagship text for this approach, with two books by Winston Weathers and Otis Winchester, their 1967
New Strategy of Style
and their 1969
Copy and Compose
, as also adopting an approach to writing based largely on imitating identified forms. He also includes Weathers's 1980 book
An Alternate Style: Options in Composition
, the book where Weathers developed his notion of Grammar B (which we'll discuss shortly), as a work recommending the value of imitation. The third category Connors describes consists of pedagogical approaches to writing centered on strategies for sentence combining. While my approach has not specifically drawn from any codified theories of sentence combining, my discussion of the surface of the sentence as the tip of an iceberg of underlying propositions shares many of the assumptions of sentence combining, and my invocation of that “Invisible God created the visible world” sentence to show how propositions get combined in sentences is right out of the sentence-combining playbook. Likewise, my enthusiasm for the Josephine Miles notion of the sentence as a progression of syntactic steps, taken by strategies of conjunction, subordination, and adjectival modification, owes much to sentence-combining theory. So while it was never my conscious intention, I've already introduced you to the three primary categories of sentence-based writing instruction that are the subject of Connors's essay.

And what Connors reports has a bit of the feel of a good news/bad news joke. The good news is that he cites a number of empirical studies that seem to validate the assumption that sentence-based writing pedagogies do indeed improve writing—and do so rather dramatically. The bad news is that they have fallen out of fashion, precisely in part because of a larger suspicion in English studies of empirical studies as antihumanist and a suspicion that these teaching techniques stifle creativity, are not themselves located in larger theories of discourse, and might actually be demeaning to students, with exercises, far removed from actual writing situations, that boil down to “mere servile copying.” More bad news is that by the mid-1980s “[t]he result of all these lines of criticism of syntactic methods was that they were stopped almost dead in their tracks as a research program and ceased being a popular teaching project just a little later.” The good news, however, is that Connors concludes, “It really does seem that the current perception that somehow sentence rhetorics ‘don't work' exists as a massive piece of wish fulfillment.” As Connors explains (more good news!) in a sentence that is as carefully suspensive as his earlier sentence was balanced: “In other words, if people believe that research has shown that sentence rhetorics don't work, their belief exists not because the record bears it out but because it is what people want to believe.”

I should explain that while I have a pretty solid foundation in writing pedagogy, I am a trained writing teacher, but not a composition theorist or formal rhetorician. I go with what works for me in the writing classroom, aware of but not overly concerned with the broad cultural and sociological implications of my approach to writing sentences. Indeed, if I'm so bold as to refer to my theory of writing, it should probably be described as magpie eclectic, since, like that curious bird, if I come across a bright or shiny theory or writing exercise, I bring it back to the nest of my classroom. I was in graduate school during the heady days in the 1970s when sentence-centered approaches to writing and more holistic approaches—such as those advanced by Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie, high priests of “freewriting,” and Donald Murray, who extended our focus in composition to the revision process—seemed like they could not only coexist in the same classroom, but might even complement each other. I was in graduate school during the days when rhetorical theory even in its most formalistic articulations seemed compatible with the much broader concerns of discourse theory as proposed by James Moffett and James Kinneavy; indeed, one of my teachers at the University of Texas was Dr. Kinneavy, a noted discourse theorist, who was also well trained in rhetorical traditions and above all else a man who loved to teach. To this day Kinneavy's influential 1971 work,
A Theory of Discourse
, provides the broader context in which I think of all of my work with sentences.

Good Rules, Bad Rules

I mention all this as a background for my heartfelt reminder that the chapters of this book are investigations, interrogations, explorations, and celebrations of the sentence and of prose style. They are not meant as a textbook that sets forth yet another set of guidelines or rules for good writing. So much that is wrong with writing instruction is wrong because a single person's beliefs have somehow been elevated to ex cathedra pronouncements and passed along from teacher to teacher and from teacher to student through generation after generation, without ever being challenged, without ever being tested against experience, without ever really being thought about. For over thirty years, I have tried to do some serious thinking about the received truths that have so largely guided our efforts to teach writing.

In this book, I have consistently advocated rule breaking, but I'm no grammatical or syntactical or rhetorical anarchist. While I believe there are many rules we should break, there are also many rules we should not break. The distinction can get tricky, but Edgar H. Schuster makes it much easier for us to tell which is which in his deliciously naughty book,
Breaking the Rules: Liberating Writers Through Innovative Grammar Instruction
. Schuster gives us a revealing history of how a very few men and a very few books have gained so much unwarranted influence and authority in the discourse of writing. He is particularly good at identifying what he calls “mythrules”: “rules that rule no one—other than perhaps a handful of pop-grammarians and hardened purists who look for their authority somewhere in the sky rather than here on earth.” He then proposes a simple test for deciding whether a rule deserves its authority. Here's a test: Choose a favorite writer, preferably a modern writer and preferably a nonfiction writer, then check to see whether the rule being tested, whether it has to do with grammar, usage, or punctuation, is followed by that writer. If it isn't, it's almost certainly a mythrule.

So much for my focus on the sentence; now, what final words do I have to offer about style?

The Pleasure and Perplexity of Prose Style

Prose style is determined by an almost infinite number of variables, some a matter of choices and decisions made by the writer, many more beyond the writer's control. Prose style manifests itself at an almost infinite number of levels in our use of language, making it very difficult to use one term to describe phenomena associated with subjects as different as the sentence, the essay, the novel, the writer, the period and culture in which the writer writes, and so on. We can speak of style at the level of the word, at the level of the sentence, at the level of larger prose units such as the paragraph, at the level of the completed piece of prose, at the level of a particular writer, at the level of a particular movement embraced by writers, at the level of a particular genre or form of writing, at the level of a century, at the level of a particular nation, and so on. This book has been built on the assumption that some of the basic building blocks of prose style can be examined closely and described precisely—particularly as those building blocks or syntactic moves appear at the level of the sentence.

The best attempt I know of to consider all the factors that determine prose style is that of my colleague and mentor in most things stylistic, Carl Klaus. In his well-known essay “Reflections on Prose Style,” which serves to introduce his
Style in English Prose
and has been reprinted in several major collections of essays on style, including (and I never get tired of saying this) the Love and Payne anthology,
Contemporary Essays on Style
, Klaus considers the factors that complicate our thinking about style as he works his way through the different approaches to style offered by commentators such as Puttenham, author of the famous aphorism “Style is the man,” Chesterfield, Hazlitt, Thoreau, Franklin, Ascham, Burton, Bunyan, and Orwell, whose “Politics and the English Language” is quite possibly the most important essay on the subject we have or could ever have.

As Klaus contemplates the nature of style, he both complicates and confirms Puttenham's claim that “style is the man,” by explaining that it may be true that writers invent their writing style, both to reveal and conceal themselves, but there are also ways in which style imposes itself on writers. The different purposes that guide our writing can compel us to adopt different styles appropriate for those specific purposes. More important, Klaus reminds us that since thought is based on language, different styles, designed for specific purposes and to achieve specific effects, “will inevitably perpetuate the forms of thought associated with them”—yet another reason why we cannot separate style from meaning or form from content. Understanding that style can shape our beliefs, Klaus concludes, gives us the most profound reason for studying prose style: the responsibility of mastering style “lest we be mastered by it.”

If from Carl Klaus we get our best explanation of the importance of prose style, it is from Richard Lanham that we get the strongest argument that our characteristic approach to the importance of style is horribly wrongheaded. In one of the most radical, most enjoyable, and most compelling educational polemics I have ever read, Lanham charges in his 1974
Style: An Anti-Textbook
that not only is our inattention to prose style in most writing classrooms a shame, but our valorization of clarity at the expense of style is nothing less than a disaster. Boiled down to its simplest form, Lanham's eloquent argument is that contemporary writing instruction with its hyperemphasis on clarity drains all the pleasure out of writing. “We pare away all the sense of verbal play, of self-satisfying joy in language, then wonder why American students have a motivation problem and don't want to write.” As he also argues, “Prose written without joy can only be read in the same spirit.” The pervasive emphasis on clarity—on the simple and direct—in American writing instruction Lanham calls the “Fallacy of Normative Prose”:

All prose style (as taught in most classrooms) cherishes a single goal and that goal is to disappear. The aim is the same for all: clarity, denotation, conceptual fidelity. The imperative of imperatives in The Books [his term for most writing texts] is “Be clear.” The best style is the never-noticed. Ideally, prose style should, like the state under Marxism, wither away, leaving the plain facts shining unto themselves.

As Lanham sums things up, The Books “do not teach style, they abolish it.” To rectify this dismal state of stylistic affairs, Lanham proposes “an alternative goal: not clarity, but a self-conscious pleasure in words.” Insisting that writing style “must be taught for and as what it is—a pleasure, a grace, a joy, a delight,” Lanham makes some provocative suggestions for how we can bring this self-conscious pleasure in words into our writing practice. In what remains one of his most surprising turns in a book full of surprises is a chapter in defense of jargon, which he calls “The Fun of a Special Language.” Whether we agree or disagree with Lanham's radical and controversial stance—and, as you might guess, I love it—every serious student of writing should know this contrarian masterpiece.