Building Great Sentences (5 page)

We can extend this process, moving the base clause step by step deeper into the sentence until we finally get to:

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,
he drove the car carefully
.

And, of course, since they are “free modifiers,” we might also switch around the order of the modifying phrases:

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

In fact, if I remember the formula for possible combinations of items correctly, and if we think of this base clause plus five modifying phrases as consisting of six items, we could write six factorial or 720 variations on this sentence, representing 720 different orders in which we might arrange its propositions. But let's not try that! While everything I know about prose style tells me that each of those ever so slightly different word orders would ever so slightly change the emphasis and the impact of the sentence, I think I can make the point I hope to make with just two variations.

The first is the sentence we started with:

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.

The second would invert the order of the sentence, placing the final modifying phrase first, and putting the base clause last:

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

No doubt it's a matter of personal taste, but I enjoy or appreciate that first sentence, where the corpse in the trunk comes as a complete surprise, a lot more than I enjoy or appreciate the second one, where the first thing we learn is that there is a corpse in the trunk, and the last thing we learn is that someone drove carefully. Indeed, I don't think my preference is idiosyncratic since even Professor Strunk suggests, “The proper place in the sentence for the word or group of words that the writer desires to make most prominent is usually the end.” When a sentence works like a mini-narrative, telling a kind of story that has a surprise ending, I think it will almost always catch a reader's attention and remind the reader of the creative mind that crafted that sentence, and that's one of the functions of style: to remind us of the mind behind the sentences we read.

The Power of Implied or Embedded Propositions

Most of us have been taught that the base clause of a sentence, the sentence's subject and predicate, is responsible for advancing its most important proposition, and this is simply not the case. Propositions carry emotional or affective impact that has nothing to do with the grammatical expression or surface structure that advances that proposition in a sentence. It is only when we consider the emotional effect of the way we order and combine the propositions that underlie the sentences we speak or write that we can consider ourselves in control of our writing. Perhaps an example from Joseph Conrad's “The Secret Sharer” can suggest the way underlying propositions may actually carry more weight or have a greater impact on the reception of a sentence than does its surface. In his article “Literature as Sentences,” published in
College English
in 1966, Richard Ohman chose the noteworthy final sentence from Conrad's celebrated story to make the case that apprehension of a literary work begins with sentences, that sentence structures have a good deal to do with our experience of a literary work, and, roughly following Chomsky's lead, that “most sentences directly and obliquely put more linguistic apparatus into operation than is readily apparent.” Ohman illustrates his argument with the striking final sentence of “The Secret Sharer”:

Walking to the taffrail, I was in time to make out, on the very edge of a darkness thrown by a towering black mass like the very gateway of Erebus—yes, I was in time to catch an evanescent glimpse of my white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.

We can almost hear the music swell as Conrad's narrator marks the departure of Leggatt, whom the narrator has helped escape formal trial for a murder at sea, having decided that Leggatt's action was justified by an extreme set of circumstances, an early brief for situational ethics. Ohman sees in this sentence a just representation of its author's mind “energetically stretching to subdue a dazzling experience outside the self.” Ohman then notes that the base clause of this sentence, “I was in time,” which is repeated, is expanded by the embedded or supporting propositions “I walked to the taffrail,” “I made out,” and “I caught,” ostensibly focusing our attention on the narrator, who is the subject of those five clauses.

Not so fast, says Ohman, who calls our attention to the fact that no less than seven of the embedded sentences, underlying propositions, have “sharer” as grammatical subject. In another three, the subject is a noun linked to “sharer” by the copula, a “be” verb, and in two, “sharer” is the direct object, and in two more, “share” is actually the verb. Thus, as Ohman sees it, thirteen propositions go to the semantic emphasis on the secret sharer, even though the surface of the sentence seems to emphasize the narrator's agency. In a fundamental way, Ohman concludes, the sentence is mainly about Leggatt, although the surface structure indicates otherwise. Now, this kind of propositional analysis is
not
necessary for us to understand Conrad's style or our own. It is, however, a useful reminder that the surface structure of a sentence may rest on a large number of unwritten propositions, and that the style of a sentence includes the way it invokes, suggests, or assumes some of those propositions, as well as the way it explicitly represents others. Nor will we always agree on how those underlying propositions affect surface meaning. For example, I look at the same propositional unpacking that Ohman offers for this sentence, and what I notice is that the narrator seems to want to hold on to the idea of the sharer as long as he can, as we frequently do with our most elaborate fantasies.

Ohman describes this wonderful sentence of Conrad's as one of “extraordinary density,” and clear propositional density is one of the goals of my approach to writing. In the next chapter, we'll focus on the surprisingly few basic ways in which we can combine propositions in our writing to achieve greater density of this impressive kind.

Next Steps

Find in your reading or in pieces of your own writing a sentence of at least twenty-five words. See if you can “unpack” its underlying propositions and list them. Then see if you can craft a different sentence that also rests on all of those underlying propositions. Or try doing this for a sentence from William Gibson's
Pattern Recognition
, a novel full of nifty sentences: “She uses the remote as demonstrated, drapes drawing quietly aside to reveal a remarkably virtual-looking skyline, a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home.”

Then, create a brief kernel sentence about something you know well. Then create two or three more brief sentences that might add useful detail or explanation to your initial kernel sentence. Finally, try to craft a single sentence that pulls together all of your previously brief sentences and that advances all of the propositions those sentences rest upon.

How Sentences Grow

R
emember General McAuliffe's answer of “Nuts!” to the German demand that he surrender during the Battle of the Bulge? Just one word, but McAuliffe's reply obviously worked as a sentence. I'm not sure whether his message to the Germans was meant to be understood as “You must be nuts to think I'm going to surrender” or “Nuts to you” or something similar, but his celebrated answer reminds us that a kernel sentence can contain only a single word. I'm going to use the term “kernel sentence” to refer to whatever word or words we use as a starting point, the “sentence zero” from which we might develop a longer, more propositional, more satisfying sentence. Think of a kernel sentence as a base clause that needs or rewards elaboration if it is to be truly effective, much less impressive. Of course, not every kernel sentence needs to be made longer. We probably shouldn't mess with kernel sentences of the “Nuts!” single-word variety, since they almost certainly are most important and most effective precisely because of their dramatic terseness.

Some kernel sentences are simply about as short as they can be, as is the case with “They slept.” Anything we might add to this two-word kernel sentence will turn it in a new direction and diminish its dramatic impact. In practice, a sentence like “They slept” would probably appear at the end of a series of sentences, the information provided in earlier sentences justifying the brevity of this one. But if we start with “They slept,” almost anything we add to it will make it more satisfying in terms of propositional information. “They slept, having finally found a campsite, sheltered from the freezing rain.” “They slept, the man simply collapsing on the bed, the woman first seeing what TV channels were available.” Lacking a previously established context, “They slept” might well lead a reader to wonder who “they” are and possibly question how or why they slept, offering the subject and the verb of the base clause as possible targets for further explanation or modification.

Consider a kernel sentence of just four words that adds an object to the verb—say, “They raised the flag.” Now we have a kernel sentence that provides us with four obvious opportunities to provide more propositional information: focused on the entire base clause, “They raised the flag”; on its subject,
they
; on its verb,
raised
; or on its object,
flag
. Adding to this kernel, we might get “They raised the flag because they knew that doing so would inspire their compatriots” or “They, who had so long awaited this moment, raised the flag” or “They raised the flag, triumphantly racing it up to the top of the flagpole” or “They raised the flag, its green striped fabric tattered and torn by bullets.”

Expanding Kernel Sentences

These sentences each take advantage of the opportunity that a kernel sentence consisting of only a subject, a verb, and an object provides us with obvious starting points for elaboration and clarification. And this is the situation we will face most frequently as we improve our writing, thinking of a kernel sentence as an invitation for more propositional content, suggesting the need for anticipating predictable questions about the subject, the verb, or the object. And, in most cases, anticipating and providing answers for those predictable questions a reader might be expected to ask by adding information to the sentence, we will make the sentence more effective.

Less obviously an invitation for more information but just as important an opportunity for providing it are longer sentences. A longer, more complicated sentence may already advance a number of propositions, but still advances propositions to which we can add more useful detail or clarification. The fact is that most of the sentences we write aren't actually that long or that complicated. Most can be improved by adding propositions that help explain the sentence, or by adding details that clarify information it advances—
as long as the additions we make are helpful, logical, and easy to follow.

Consider this sentence: “Thomas Berger is one of America's most respected but underread novelists.” Then see how easily this sentence becomes only a part of a more extended and elaborate sentence: “‘Thomas Berger, the author of
Little Big Man
, his classic retelling of the story of the Old West, is one of America's most respected but underread novelists' is for me the most important sentence in an article I read about unjustly neglected writers.” Or consider an even more elaborate expansion of an already elaborate sentence: “Cumulative sentences fascinate me with their ability to add information that actually makes the sentence easier to read and more satisfying, flying in the face of the received idea that cutting words rather than adding them is the most effective way to improve writing.” This rather complicated sentence of over forty words becomes a kernel sentence if we use it as the starting point for an even longer sentence that advances even more propositions. Thus, we might build from this kernel sentence the following: “Cumulative sentences, those loose sentences that quickly posit a base clause and then elaborate it by adding modifying words and phrases, fascinate me with their ability to add information that actually makes the sentence easier to read and more satisfying, answering questions as it provides more detail and explanation, flying in the face of the received idea that cutting words rather than adding them is the most effective way to improve writing.”

Or we might write: “Cumulative sentences that start with a brief base clause and then start picking up new information, much as a snowball gets larger as it rolls downhill, fascinate me with their ability to add information that actually makes the sentence easier to read and more satisfying because it starts answering questions as quickly as an inquisitive reader might think of them, using each modifying phrase to clarify what has gone before, and to reduce the need for subsequent explanatory sentences, flying in the face of the received idea that cutting words rather than adding them is the most effective way to improve writing, reminding us that while in some cases, less is indeed more, in many cases, more is more, and more is what our writing needs.” I can't prove that either of those extended examples is actually a better sentence than the one we started with, but I would argue that neither is hard to follow and both contain extra propositional information that adds to their effectiveness.

Tough-Guy Style: Predicative Sentences

Kernel sentences, distinguished by their lack of detail and explanation, can themselves create a kind of writing style. In fact, we might think of this style as the starting point for all other styles. Kernel sentences that simply posit a bare minimum of information offer the most basic form of “predication.” Highly predicative prose isn't long on explanations. It has a kind of take-it-or-leave-it quality. This is macho-speak that bluntly posits information without reflecting upon it or elaborating it, and we find it exactly where we might expect to find it:

His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky. He had a long, heavy beard, and his hair was hanging down over his ears to his neck, and he had a hand out trying to thumb a ride from a car that was stopped at the pump.

This is how David Morrell began his 1972 novel
First Blood
, and his famous protagonist shares his narrator's preference for simple declarations. Later in the novel, when Rambo briefly considers surrendering to the authorities who are hunting him, he quickly dismisses the thought:

Then he would throw down his rifle and hold up his hands and yell that he was surrendering. The idea revolted him. He couldn't let himself merely stand and wait for them. He'd never done it before. It was disgusting.

We refer to these short, simple sentences and simple compound sentences as being predicative, and they are characteristic of the style Walker Gibson calls “tough”—a style frequently associated with some of Ernest Hemingway's best-known fiction. In his 1966 study “Tough, Sweet & Stuffy: An Essay on Modern American Prose Styles,” Gibson closely examines the celebrated first paragraph of Hemingway's
Farewell to Arms
:

In the late summer of that year, we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river, there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Gibson explains this highly predicative style is tough because its speaker, Frederic Henry, Hemingway's protagonist, says only what he could see or directly experience during a limited period of time, linking observations primarily with conjunctions, stating information without processing it. This predicative style is very effective when creating tough-guy characters, men and women who act, but don't think much about what they do. It's a style that Will Strunk would be hard-pressed to criticize, although I doubt he ever wanted any of his students to write exactly this way.

Needless to say, the strongly predicative style is not one I'll be advocating for effective writing, unless you want to write tough-guy narratives. The highly predicative style seems to me to introduce the reader to a mind that is amazingly unreflective, almost anesthetized, or so focused on one purpose that it simply refuses to think about anything else or consider alternate points of view. That mindset is great for Rambo, but I don't think that's the mind we most want to introduce to our readers, unless our goal is to intimidate them. Accordingly, my approach to writing is more concerned with how we move beyond a highly predicative style.

Beyond Tough-Guy Style: Connective, Subordinative, and Adjectival Sentences

Once we have a kernel sentence of any length, there are three—and only three—basic syntactic approaches we can take to building it: (1) we can add propositional information by using conjunctions or other connective words to add to the sentence in much the same way we might add more boxcars to a train; (2) we can add propositional information by subordinating some parts of the sentence to other parts; and (3) we can add propositional information by using modifying words and phrases that turn underlying propositions into modifiers.

Our earlier discussion of kernel sentences has already given us examples of these three fundamental strategies. Given the kernel sentence “The girl raised the flag,” we can see an example of the first strategy in the sentence “The girl raised the flag and was proud to see it waving once again over the town square.” The conjunction
and
here adds a new proposition, that the girl was proud to see the flag waving once again over the town square, to give us a compound sentence. Similarly, we might use a connective word such as
because
to get a new extended sentence that not only advances the proposition that she raised the flag, but also explains why: “The girl raised the flag because she knew that doing so would inspire her compatriots.” Sentences we build using this strategy simply add on information, and we can call our syntactic strategy “connective.”

The second strategy for building a sentence is to add new information, but to make it subordinate to information in the kernel. So, given the kernel “The girl raised the flag,” we can add the proposition that the girl had just realized she was the only survivor by putting that information in a subordinate relative clause: “The girl, who had just realized she was the only survivor, raised the flag.” Similarly, we might add new information about the flag by putting it in a subordinate relative clause: “The girl raised the flag that had long been a symbol of the resistance movement.” When we subordinate information by putting it in clauses introduced by relative pronouns, such as
who
,
which
, or
that
, we can call our syntactic strategy “subordinative.”

The third main strategy for building a sentence is to add new information by boiling that information down to a single modifying word or phrase. For instance, we can add the proposition that the girl was young simply by writing “The young girl raised the flag.” Or we can add information in modifying phrases that follow the base clause: “The girl raised the flag, a triumphant grin on her face, the flag's green striped fabric tattered and torn by bullets, her bravery an inspiration to her compatriots.”

When we extend a sentence primarily by adding modifying words and phrases, we adopt a syntactic strategy we, following the lead of Josephine Miles, might call “adjectival.” Of course, we can, and usually do, combine two or even all three of these strategies when we build a longer sentence, but it's fascinating that there are only three main ways in which we can build more effective sentences.

Most of my approach to better writing arises from and focuses heavily on learning to use adjectival strategies to write more effectively, but I think it's very important for us to remember that adjectival strategies are only one of three main ways in which we can build longer sentences. Let's try to put this notion of three main strategies for lengthening sentences toward an even more useful sense of how sentences work. These three strategies point toward three different ways that a sentence can take a step forward.

Sentences Grow Step-by-Step

Pioneering poet and style theorist Josephine Miles, the first woman to gain tenure in the English Department at Berkeley, gave a lot of thought to the way in which we might think of sentences as a series of steps. In her 1967 book
Style and Proportion: The Language of Prose and Poetry
, Miles herself employs a stunning sentence to introduce us to a new way of thinking about sentences: “Prose proceeds forward in time by steps less closely measured, but not less propelling, than the steps of verse.” She explains: