Building Great Sentences (4 page)

Some of these rules are not rules at all, but simply reflect majority values or practices, and can be broken without any real harm to making ourselves understood. Churchill slyly reminded us how silly it is to make and obey a rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, by referring to the things “up with which he would not put.”

The
Harbrace College Handbook
I was required to purchase as a college freshman contains a “Glossary of Grammatical Terms” that runs on for some twenty-four pages. Included are terms such as parts of speech, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, participles, conjunctions, gerunds, and so on. The dirty little secret of correct grammar, however, is that it allows a writer to avoid grammatical mistakes, but the most perfect adherence to all the rules of grammar will not necessarily produce writing that is effective, much less impressive. Grammar describes the machinery of the sentence, but it doesn't teach us how to make the sentence go anywhere or do anything. In other words, studying grammar is more than a little bit like counting the spines of a dead fish.

I'll use some grammatical terms as our consideration of sentences develops, simply because that's the easiest way for me to suggest how to get our sentences to do some of the things we want them to do. But knowing grammar backward and forward is not in itself a step toward better writing. In fact, it can and frequently does lead to boring or ineffective writing that is grammatically correct but not good for much of anything else. My interest has to do much, much more with rhetoric.

Through a history that no doubt dates from our earliest use of language, but has been recorded from the fifth century B.C., rhetoric has been associated with persuasion. Rhetoric, unlike grammar, has to do with both motive and impact, the reasons why we use language to accomplish certain goals, and the extent to which it accomplishes them. Or to put this another way, grammar has to do with words, while rhetoric has to do with the way we do things with words. Rhetoric focuses on the producer of language, the speaker or writer, and on the receiver of language, the listener or reader. Grammar has to do with words as objects that can be labeled and classified, while rhetoric has to do with the purposes to which we put language, and to the consequences of our efforts.

Richard Lanham is a maverick rhetorician and author of
Style: An Anti-Textbook
, a book whose wisdom I find myself coming back to again and again. Lanham concludes that a contemporary understanding of rhetoric best describes it as the “science of human attention-structures.” Rhetoric is about the best ways of getting and holding attention with language, and shaping that attention to achieve particular outcomes.

There are a lot of grammatical labels. We categorize sentences by the number and kinds of clauses they contain, leading us to describe sentences as simple, compound, or complex. But a simple sentence can create an incredibly complex reaction in a reader, and a complex sentence may have only a very simple impact. Accordingly, we will rely more on terms or labels that direct our attention to the ways in which sentences deliver their goods, remembering that what they deliver is emotional impact, as well as information. The main point to remember here is that effectiveness in writing is largely a rhetorical issue, and grammar alone cannot lead us to effective writing.

The Problem of Style

There's one other term I really ought to mention, although, having gone this far without discussing it in an extended or rigorous way, I'm tempted to see if I can get away with not exploring its many complexities and vagaries. That term is, of course,
style
. Style is a concept so rich, so expansive, so subjective, and so contested that any attempt to define it immediately encounters resistance, if not outright hostility. We refer to the style of a period, the style of a literary form or genre, the style of a nation, the style of an individual writer, the style of a work by an individual writer, the style of a particular period in a writer's career (as in early or late Henry James), the style of a group or movement of writers, the style of a particular period in a movement (as in early or late modernism), the style of a particular kind of sentence, and so on. Style means something different in each of these cases. Moreover, style may mean one thing to a writer who consciously chooses to emphasize certain prose features, while style may mean something entirely different to a reader who consciously looks for and prefers quite different prose features.

So with a mixture of desperation and ingenuity, I've come up with a definition of style that I use when talking about sentences:
Style is what the writer writes and/or what the reader reads.
That's about as inclusive a definition of style as one can get. It's also a definition that refuses to distinguish style from content or meaning. I made the case earlier for the notion that style is content, but while we've been referring to Strunk and White, let me add E. B. White's considerable authority to this argument. In his brief essay “An Approach to Style,” which he appended to Will Strunk's rules, White admits that there is no satisfactory explanation of style distinguished from content:

Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity. It is nondetachable, unfilterable.

A writer of spare, stripped-down prose, such as Hemingway, is every bit as engaged in the creation of a writing style as is a writer of lush, elaborate prose, such as Faulkner. All the choices we make as writers are stylistic choices, even when the creation of a style or the use of features we think of as stylistic is the furthest thing from our minds. Form or content can only emerge from language we choose in the order we arrange it—stylistic choices—and there is absolutely no way that we can separate what we want to mean from the way we write. Nor can we ever assume that our readers find interesting and valuable the same constructions of language we find interesting and valuable. It is for this reason that I state that style is what the writer writes and/or what the reader reads. Language
is
style, style
is
meaning, meaning
is
form, and all of these terms refer equally to every word that we write.

Next Steps

Think of a favorite sentence or saying and then see if you can think of at least two different ways you might try to convey the point of the original sentence. The best way to do this is to figure out what propositions underlie the original sentence and then try to represent those propositions in your versions by using different words and different word order. Then consider how the versions you came up with might be read differently—how they might have slightly different meanings.

The Primacy of Propositions

I
n 1926, H. W. Fowler, the legendary English lexicographer and philologist, writing in his authoritative
Dictionary of Modern English Usage
, complained vociferously that
proposition
was a “Jack-of-all-trades” word that had come to be used in so many different ways that it really had no meaning. Disdainfully noting that misuse of this term had apparently spread from America to England, Fowler thundered that people use
proposition
because “there is less trouble in using it than in choosing a more suitable word from the dozen or so whose places it is apt to usurp.”

What so bothered Fowler was that this term, so clearly tied to propounding or setting forth an idea in philosophy, had come to be used to refer to commercial proposals, tasks, jobs, problems, occupations, trades, opponents, prospects, enterprises worth undertaking, areas, fields, and, most galling of all, when used as a verb, making an “amatory advance.” In the study of logic, a proposition is a statement in which the subject is affirmed or denied by the predicate. I have suggested that a proposition is a statement about reality that can be accepted or rejected. I like to think of a proposition as a kind of basic or elementary statement that can't easily be broken down into constituent propositions. “I live” is thus a proposition, but “I am tired and hungry” actually expresses two basic propositions, “I am tired” and “I am hungry.”

Now, in rigorous logical terms, each of those propositions can actually be broken down further into propositions: that there is something called an “I”; that I am in the category of those things; that there's a category of physical or emotional condition known as being tired; that my physical or emotional condition falls into that category; and so on. But this kind of rigor will make us crazy and doesn't help us to write better sentences, so I generally won't push things past identifying the propositions directly indicated by visible words in a sentence. So I'll call “I am tired” a proposition and “I am hungry” a proposition, and say that the sentence “I am tired and hungry” expresses two propositions and that these two propositions can be expressed or advanced in a number of different ways. I might say “I, who am tired, am also hungry” or “I, being tired, am also hungry” or I might boil the two propositions down to single-word modifiers that let me start a sentence with “Tired and hungry” and then take it from there: “Tired and hungry, just back from a week in the bush, I limped into the mess hall, hoping the food lines were still open.”

Propositions à la Chomsky

Fowler probably wouldn't approve of the way I'm using the term
proposition
, but Noam Chomsky probably would. In 1966, Chomsky famously made a seventeenth-century discussion of propositions by the Port Royal Grammarians one of the central arguments for his theory of deep structure and transformational grammar. In
Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought,
Chomsky claimed that the loose association of seventeenth-century French scholars known as the Port Royal Logicians, or Grammarians, had developed the framework for his discussion of language formation in terms of deep and surface structure, and the transformative steps that lead from the former to the latter.

Chomsky's claims in
Cartesian Linguistics
were immediately challenged, and his linguistic theories remain a site of controversy. For my purposes, however, those controversies are beside the point, since my concern is not with linguistic theories about the formation of language, a process that seems to take place largely at the unconscious level, but with theories of composition that focus on conscious decisions we make when we write sentences. What matters in Chomsky's discussion is the example of the relation between a sentence and its underlying propositions, as he cites from the
Port-Royal Grammar
published in 1660. The sentence Chomsky cites is “
Dieu invisible a créé le monde visible.
” This sentence in English is “Invisible God created the visible world.” The
Port-Royal Grammar
noted that this sentence actually advanced not just one, but three different propositions: that God is invisible, that God created the world, and that the world is visible, with the second proposition—that God created the world—being the most important. As Chomsky sums up his argument:

In other words, the deep structure underlying the proposition “Invisible God created the visible world” consists of three abstract propositions, each expressing a certain simple judgment, although its surface form expresses only the subject-attribute structure.

Or, as he puts it another way, there exists a deep structure, an unwritten or unspoken “underlying mental reality,” the unwritten propositions, below the surface structure of the spoken or written form of the sentence. He concludes that “the deep structure consists of a system of propositions, and it does not receive a direct, point-by-point expression in the actual physical object (the sentence) that is produced.”

Propositions à la Landon

In borrowing Chomsky's example and applying it to the conscious choices we make in writing sentences, I'm neither endorsing nor challenging his theories of transformational grammar. His concerns are quite different from mine. The key here is to think of a sentence as being a visible piece of writing, and the propositions it advances as assumptions and ideas not necessarily visible or written out. As I've noted before, a written sentence usually rests on or contains a number of underlying propositions, most of which the sentence simply assumes, and which would be too basic or simple-sounding to actually write out.

I'll say it again: the basic unit of writing sentences is the proposition, and we build sentences by putting propositions together. The style of our sentences is determined by the ways in which we combine not words, but the propositions those words stand for or refer to.

Let's take a look at some of the ways we can join propositions. Sentences can coordinate propositions by putting them side by side. For example, I might combine two propositions with a conjunction: “I like to read and I like to write.” Or I might subordinate one to another: “I, who like to write, also like to read.” Or I might mark temporal or causal relationships: “Because I like to write I like to read” or “After I enjoy reading something, I like to start writing.”

Let's return to that sentence from the
Port-Royal Grammar
: “Invisible God created the visible world.” Let's look a bit more closely at the underlying propositions neither Chomsky nor the Port Royal Grammarians thought deserving of mention.

First, that God exists, there is a God, and that the world exists, there is a world. Certainly that first proposition remains a subject of some debate today, and at least among some philosophies, the proposition that the world exists also remains an active question. And underlying the notion that God created the world is the proposition that God is powerful enough to have done so. I'm stretching a point, but what I hope you'll see is that the sentence “Invisible God created the visible world” actually rests upon a number of unstated, unwritten propositions. Moreover, those propositions might have been implied or acknowledged by writing this sentence in a number of different ways.

For instance, the sentence might have been written, “God is invisible, and the world is visible, and God created the world”; or “God is invisible, and God created the world, and the world is visible”; or “God, who is invisible, created the world, which is visible”; or “God, being invisible, created the world, it being visible”; or “Being invisible, God created the world, which is visible.” Or we could have shifted the focus of the sentence from God to the world: “The world is visible and it was created by God, and God is invisible” or “The world is visible, and God is invisible, and the world was created by God” or “The visible world was created by invisible God” or “The world, which is visible, was created by God, who is invisible” or “Being visible, the world was created by invisible God” and so on.

Even more of the underlying propositions might have been brought to the surface of the sentence. For instance, “There is a God, and God is invisible, and God created the world” or “There is a world and the world is visible, and there is a God and God is invisible, and God created the world” or “There is a God who is invisible and God created the world, which is visible” or “There is a God who is invisible, and there is a world, which is visible, and God created the world” or “There is a world which is visible and the world was created by God, who is invisible.”

Prose Style Rests on the Arrangement of Propositions in the Sentence

There's no way to predict all the differences and how these variations might actually hit a reader, but it seems safe to assume that a sentence mentioning God three times and the world once will have a slightly different impact on a reader than a sentence that mentions the world three times and God twice. And there surely must be some difference between a sentence that simply assumes God exists and one that chooses to make that claim explicitly.

But let's leave the theologically complicated territory of this particular sentence to see how E. B. White approached the same phenomenon in his afterword to William Strunk's
Elements of Style
. White suggests to his readers, “If you doubt that style is something of a mystery, try rewriting a familiar sentence and see what happens.” The sentence he chooses is Thomas Paine's famous “These are the times that try men's souls.” And the variations he considers are “Times like these try men's souls” and “How trying it is to live in these times!” and “These are trying times for men's souls” and my favorite, “Soulwise, these are trying times.” White dryly concludes, “It seems unlikely that Thomas Paine could have made his sentiment stick if he had couched it in any of these forms.” Similarly, imagine the result if instead of uttering his famous “I came, I saw, I conquered,” Caesar had stated, “After arriving and looking around, I conquered”!

Let's take one step further the idea that a written sentence is the surface expression of one or more underlying and unwritten propositions. Let's see how the order in which the written sentence advances those underlying propositions can make a big difference in the way the sentence works. This is an important step for writers to take because once it becomes clear that the order in which propositions appear in a sentence directly affects the way the sentence works, writers can take conscious control of that order to better accomplish their purpose for the sentence.

Consider this sentence: “He drove the car carefully, his shaggy hair whipped by the wind, his eyes hidden behind wraparound mirror shades, his mouth set in a grim smile, a .38 Police Special on the seat beside him, the corpse stuffed in the trunk.” I think most of us would agree that the punch of this sentence comes at the end, and that the most significant proposition it advances is that there's a corpse in the trunk. But that's only one of the propositions the sentence advances. Those propositions and the order in which they appear are:

1. He drove the car.

2. He drove carefully.

3. He had shaggy hair.

4. The wind whipped his shaggy hair.

5. His eyes were hidden.

6. Wraparound mirror shades hid them.

7. His mouth was set in a smile.

8. The smile was grim.

9. There was a .38 Police Special.

10. It was on the seat by him.

11. There was a corpse in the trunk.

We could argue about whether “He drove the car carefully” should count as one proposition or as two, or whether a grim smile suggests one proposition or two, or whether the detail that the corpse in the trunk had been stuffed there should add another proposition, but these distinctions don't really matter and shouldn't bother us. The point is that this sentence rests on a bunch of propositions, one of which seems considerably more significant and certainly is more dramatic than the others. That such a more dramatic proposition is not revealed until the very end of the sentence builds suspense and might be thought of as a surprise ending.

If we look at the surface of the sentence, we see that it unfolds its underlying propositions through six distinct steps or chunks or discrete sequences of words: one clause, “He drove the car carefully,” followed by five modifying phrases. “He drove the car carefully” is the base clause, “his shaggy hair whipped by the wind” a modifying phrase, “his eyes hidden behind wraparound mirror shades” another modifying phrase, and “his mouth set in a grim smile, a .38 Police Special on the seat beside him, the corpse stuffed in the trunk.” The clause “He drove the car carefully” contains a subject,
he
, and a verb,
drove
, and could stand alone as a sentence.

Each modifying phrase contains or suggests a verb form, but not an active verb, and none of the modifying phrases can stand by itself as a sentence, even though each represents one of the propositions underlying the sentence. And because these particular modifying phrases can be moved around and still make sense since all of them modify some aspect of the base clause, we call them free modifiers. Like LEGOs, free modifiers can be stuck together lots of different ways. For instance, our sentence might be rearranged by moving the base clause deeper, but keeping the modifying phrases in their original order.

His shaggy hair whipped by the wind,
he drove the car carefully
, his eyes hidden behind wraparound mirror shades, his mouth set in a grim smile, a .38 Police Special on the seat beside him, the corpse stuffed in the trunk.

Or we can move it deeper still:

His shaggy hair whipped by the wind, his eyes hidden behind wraparound mirror shades,
he drove the car carefully
, his mouth set in a grim smile, a .38 Police Special on the seat beside him, the corpse stuffed in the trunk.