If you love to write, this book should be a lot of fun to read. If you write for a living, it should make your life a lot easier. Learning about these writing techniques, and trying them out in practice sessions, has noticeably affected my ability to communicate, to express my own voice more vividly, and to take more pleasure in the writing process. And the same seems to have been true for this book’s readers. Over five thousand novelists, bloggers, and freelancers have read, shared, and commented on these essays. Some readers said that they reached the final essay in a state of euphoria, feeling that a veil had been removed from their eyes. However, if reading through these pieces merely expands your verbal toolkit, and merely gives you more options as you work on your next writing project, I will be very happy. 2 Before we begin, here are two quick notes: Note one: these essays owe a huge debt of gratitude to Rahawa Haile and Brooks Landon, who together guided me to discover the riches of the sentence. Note two: this is a completely free resource intended for educational purposes. Feel free to share it, comment on it, but please don’t alter it—and please don’t do something else weird with it that I cannot at present anticipate. Yours, Daniel David Wallace

Contents

Although style is a topic addressed in many books on writing, I found that these books either: 1. Presented useful tips on style hidden among other subjects. 2. Expected grammatical knowledge that few readers have today. 3. Had been largely forgotten by the writing public. My series draws together advice on style from a range of related topics. The essays cover the order you put words down on the screen, the sound those words make in the reader’s ear, how caring about style makes you a better thinker, and how style and point of view are connected. My aim is to present it all simply enough that anyone who likes words can understand and immediately use. 4 The series contains ten short essays. The first four essays look at how we join ideas together, the order of words, and the connections between them. The next three, essays five to seven, try to unpack a sentence’s building blocks, the grammatical components and necessary elements, so that we can learn how to assemble these blocks in combinations that are unique to our own voice and style. The final three essays discuss the sound that good prose makes, even when we read it in silence, so that our words take on a haunting, striking clarity. A final, extra essay, a masterclass, wraps up the series and demonstrates every technique at work in a single sentence: the amazing first sentence of Dan Simmons’s science fiction classic, Hyperion. Let’s get started

The essays: Introduction to the Series 1. Put the key word last. 2. Noun style, verb style. 3. Parataxis, or how to write like Hemingway. 4. Hypotaxis, or how to argue and explain. 5. Clauses and kernel sentences. 6. Phrases, and branching sentences. 7. Christensen’s cumulative sentence. 8. Stress and flow. 9. Iambs and beats. 10. Sounds in Lonely Places. 11. Series conclusion and demonstration of the techniques at work. Postscript: Resources and further reading

Key Word Last

Okay. Let’s start with something simple. Perhaps the most basic question, writing or editing any given sentence, is to ask -- where should the most important word go? Should your key point or central image be placed at the start of the sentence, somewhere in the middle, or at the end? Essay One: Put the most important word last. The advice from The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White, that famous little book of grammatical rules and stylistic commandments, is that writers should put a sentence’s most important idea last. 7 Strunk and White advise writers to “place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.” In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White give this sentence as an example of what they mean, with the original, flawed version on the left, and the corrected revision to the right: Humanity has hardly advanced in fortitude since that time, though it has advanced in many other ways. Humanity, since that time, has advanced in many other ways, but it has hardly advanced in fortitude. Given this example, it’s hard to argue with their theory. The first version of the sentence seems self-doubting, taking a nervous step back as soon as it has advanced its claim. Worse, the reader is left unsure whether fortitude or those “many other ways” are the sentence’s focus. If the “ways” are the focus, why are they mentioned so vaguely—but, if they are not, why have we already acquired the sentence’s key information halfway through? The revised version makes its priorities clear—fortitude is its subject, and the “other ways” are merely there for contrast. And we have to read the entire sentence before we understand it, which releases, at its end dot, a charge of meaningful energy, a buzz of intellectual juice, that makes us feel well treated. The sentence seems to ring. This “putting the key word last” principle is particularly useful in 8 comic writing, where the punch-line needs to hit with the suddenness of a full stop, and is in visible use in Iris Owens’s 1973 novel, After Claude. Her narrator, Harriet, is a New York free spirit gone wrong, penniless, homeless, desperate to save her relationship with a man she hates. The reader gets to enjoy her tirades even while questioning their relation to outside reality. Many of Harriet’s sentences feel so perfect because they rise to an unexpected, scandalous, utterly self-justified conclusion—they put the key words last. His voice got soft and mean. “Has anyone ever told you what a terrible bore you are?” “Me a bore?” I laughed, amazed that the rat would resort to such a bizarre accusation. I have since learned never to be amazed at what men will resort to when cornered by a woman’s intelligence. The last sentence would be far less funny, less right, if it went: When cornered by a woman’s intelligence, men will resort to anything, I have since learned. My weak revision puts the stress on Harriet’s learning, whereas the original holds back its best word, “intelligence,” right to the close, each 9 of its pieces raising the stakes, cornering the reader just as Harriet believes her intelligence has cornered Claude. The sentence snakes along, gathering speed, each piece the answer to or development of what preceded it—and its claim, that Harriet’s intelligence is too much for Claude, seems proved by her sentence’s zing and punch. Later in their argument, Harriet exclaims to herself: His distortions, the lies he was telling himself and me, fi lled me with a cold fury, because, as an American, my war against injustice knows no bounds. This works so well because each comma takes the sentence to a further height, going from distortions to lies, to fury, to the well-armed American thirst for justice. The joke is set up in the penultimate phrase, where we wonder, stunned, how being an American can possibly relate to Harriet’s current situation, and the answer comes straight away—her life with Claude, she proclaims, is another episode in the Cold War, in Manifest Destiny. 10 It’s also worth noting that these choices allow Owens to keep her narrator’s tone relaxed, untheatrical, because her word sequencing does the work of italics or exclamations. Her end-loaded sentences guide us quietly up to the next slap in the mouth. Here is Harriet, for instance, giving her opinion of dreams: That night I had my usual dreamless sleep. I hardly ever dream, which is probably a reflection of the fact that I live my life fully and consciously. I solve my problems while awake, and, as a result, spend my sleeping hours resting, not receiving inane messages. So. The advice is—put the key word, or phrase, last. It gives your arguments the ring of inevitability. It means that readers are less likely to skip ahead, knowing that at the end of each breath lies a gem. It lets your best jokes or claims stand alone during the pause of the full stop, confident in their visibility. However, there are situations when one should probably not put the key word last. This “end-loaded” style very often goes along with an air of calm, of reflection, of control. Neither Owens’s nor Baldwin’s narrator talk like they are in personal danger—they stand outside their tales’ events, explaining and presenting with the ease that time and safety brings. One situation where you might not want to end-load your sentences is when you want to stress action, sudden developments, scattered consciousness. 11 For example, imagine a narrator writes— In the little town of Luton, in the dim gray of evening, halfway down a dripping alley, while I stood frozen in shock, the dog bared its teeth, and leaped. A reader is unlikely to feel much concern for the narrator’s longevity. This is not how people at risk think or speak—instead it sounds like someone remembering and recreating with all the resources of a detailed diary, hotel receipts, street maps, and a camera crew. In action-heavy prose, or in prose meant to convey the immediacy of experience, or a nonchalant deadness of affect (the kind found in Hemingway and Denis Johnson, for instance), the ringing culminations of end-loaded prose may seem out of place.

Verb Style

Here is a second writing technique that is simple to understand, but substantial in effect: the difference between a noun-based style and a verb-based one. It comes from Richard A. Lanham’s Analyzing Prose, an excellent guide to writing style. Essay Two: Noun style, verb style Lanham suggests that a passage of writing can either be dominated by verbs, or by nouns. I came. I saw. I conquered. Arrival; Reconnaissance; Victory. 13 The verby version, the first one, I think you’ll agree, sounds better, and this is Lanham’s point—passages that rely on verbs usually sound better than those that rely on nouns. Verb styles sound stronger, clearer, and yet we constantly encounter noun-style writing whenever we open an official document, scientific or technical writing, or academic prose. Lanham quotes, as an example of noun style, this awful passage, which is much less readable than its author probably believes: The connection between behaviour in the socially real world and dramatic performance is a double link. Much of everyday social behavior and socially consequential action is itself composed, and often in a fashion which is recognised at the time as ‘theatrical’ or is revealed as such afterwards. Lanham points out the basic structure of this sort of prose: “noun + is + prepositional phrase.” If you do not use strong verbs, you risk getting locked into this pattern, this sequence 0f vague verbs and prepositions, one after another. The connection between behavior 14 in the socially real world and dramatic performance is a double link. Opening my filing cabinet, and pulling out an official document at random, I see: Adjuncts and Visiting Lecturers are eligible to receive contributions from the College towards health insurance premiums. This kind of writing isn’t grammatically incorrect, but it is dull. In contrast, here is Virginia Woolf, in her novel To the Lighthouse, who Lanham deploys to represent the verb style. Imagine you want to write a paragraph describing what a longer winter night is like. Probably you would reach for a succession of nouns and adjectives: “it was cold... there was ice on the driveway...” That’s not what Woolf does. Her winter is full of verbs, of strong clear actions. But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, 15 evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where golden letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore. Wow. Perhaps you noticed, however, that Woolf’s passage actually contains many prepositional phrases, such as “in the gloom of cool cathedral caves.” Lanham points out that Woolf chooses to emphasise these phrases by frequently keeping them the same length, and so building a deliberate rhythm into the passage: The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where golden letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. 16 Virginia Woolf is infamous for writing intricate, complex prose. And yet, in the above passage, most of her sentences begin simply, clearly, with the “subject-verb” opening that forms the basis of the standard English sentence (e.g. “The winter holds,” “The autumn trees gleam”). Verb-based sentences tend to present their readers with clear, distinct claims. Here, for instance, is master copywriter Brian Clark, warning his students to avoid clickbait, in How to Write Magnetic Headlines: If people don’t believe you can deliver on your promise, they won’t bother reading further, and your over-the-top headline fails. See how Clark’s verbs anchor and strengthen the sentence: If people don’t believe you can deliver on your promise, they won’t bother reading further, and your over-the-top headline fails. Noun-styles, on the other hand, tend to rely on long sentence openers, and worse, on abstract phrases like “the phenomenon of,” or “a reason why,” or “the process of.” These phrases bog down both reader and writer. Nora Bacon, in her textbook The Well-Crafted Sentence, gives this example: 17 Another reason that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a mistake is that it caused the stature of the United States as a world leader to plummet. This sentence’s point seems simple, even obvious, and yet the poor reader has to read eleven words merely to find out what the sentence is about. Bacon corrects it to: Furthermore, when the United States invaded Iraq, its stature as a world leader plummeted. Another benefit of verb style: it tends to be concise. Lanham points out that, if translated into verb-style, most noun-style sentences will be shortened. Verb-style seems to lead to plainer, simpler ways of expressing ideas. 18 Now, in reality, few writers consistently maintain such a clear style preference, and good writing can mingle action and object, verb and noun style. Sometimes a good verb should lead the sentence; sometimes a string of prepositional phrases will work better. Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness is defiantly nouny, but I’m not sure that this damages it: The root of the trouble springs from too much emphasis upon competitive success as the main source of happiness. I do not deny that the feeling of success makes it easier to enjoy life. A painter, let us say, who has been obscure throughout his youth, is likely to become happier if his talent wins recognition. Nor do I deny that money, up to a certain point, is very capable of increasing happiness; beyond that point, I do not think it does so. What I do maintain is that success can only be one ingredient in happiness, and is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it. And here is Thoreau, in Walden, speaking of solitude, both his nouns and verbs doing their fair share: Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root

Parataxis

In your writing, do you relate one thing to another, explaining what is cause and what is effect, when one experience ends and another begins, which of two facts is primary and which secondary? Or do you place each element on the page alone—each image, concept, claim—and let the reader guess the connection? The first option is formally called hypotaxis, where one element is placed under another (“hypo” meaning beneath, and “taxis” arrangement), and the second, parataxis. I do not think I can offer a better introduction to parataxis than Richard A. Lanham’s, in Analyzing Prose, where he writes, Whatever units a writer chooses to work with—phrases, clauses, or complete sentences—he or she must relate them equally or unequally. He or she can tell us how they are related—A caused B, B came after A—and thus subordinate one to the 21 other, by cause, time, or whatever, or can simply juxtapose them and leave the relationship up to us. When Caesar wrote, “I came; I saw; I conquered” (Veni, vidi, vici), he leaving a great deal up to us. We were to infer that, for Caesar, diagnosing the situation (“I saw”) and defeating the enemy (“I conquered”) were no more difficult than simply appearing on the scene (“I came”). He boasts without seeming to by putting three different kinds of action on the same syntactic level. This syntactic democracy is called parataxis. All writing relies on parataxis to some degree, because often there is no need to spell out a connection—putting one sentence after another is enough. Essay Three: Parataxis. Or, how to write like Hemingway. Much narrative action, for instance, inevitably relies on parataxis—unconscious for the writer, unnoticed by the reader—using the forward motion of events to offer the necessary linkage between images and ideas. Here is John Grisham, in The Firm, describing a rogue FBI agent leaving a mobster’s hotel room, his briefcase filled with bribe money: Tarry Ross walked in panic down the hall. He could see little 22 from behind the glasses. Seven doors down, almost to the elevator, a huge hand reached from the darkness and pulled him into the room. The hand slapped him hard, and another fist landed in his stomach. Another fist to the nose. He was on the floor, dazed and bleeding. The briefcase was emptied on the bed. The action has to move quickly, and we need no placement or explanation other than where exactly the huge hand grabs him (“almost to the elevator”). If we also had commentary and explanation, this would indicate either a distinct narrator commenting from a safe distance, or that Tarry is a very unusual person, with the mental capacity to reflect on what is happening to him while he is getting beaten. Parataxis, therefore, can be a natural, unobtrusive way to tell a story. But its lack of connecting links can also be emphasised, to help a more artistic para-tactician portray confusion and unease, or to describe a scene which itself lacks order. In The Great Gatsby, Nick finds Gatsby’s parties disorientating, and so Fitzgerald has him narrate his impressions in a rambling, disjunctive parataxis. “You don’t know who we are,” said one of the girls in yellow, “but we met you here about a month ago.” “You’ve dyed your hair since then,” remarked Jordan and I started but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the sup- 23 per, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket. With Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine we descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. It is possible, although more tricky, to write an essay or argument paratactically. Such an essay does not explain—it merely states one maxim or belief after another, and its self-certainty is its proof. Here is D.H. Lawrence, in his unforgettably strange Studies in Classic American Literature. Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is always a master. And men can either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine. In American this frictional opposition has been the vital factor. It has given the Yankee his kick. Only the continual influx of more servile Europeans has provided America with an obedient labouring class. The true obedience never outlasting the first generation. But there sits the old master, over in Europe. Like a parent. Somewhere deep in every American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe. Yet no American feels he has completely escaped its mastery. 24 Lawrence is not interested in explaining his terms, or detailing the process of how one thing leads to another. Although he uses the occasional hypotactic conjunction, like “hence,” or “only”, mostly these points are delivered like self-evident facts, and a reader is obliged to accept each of Lawrence’s grim statements, or close the book. There is no half-reading here; there is no wavering or questioning. And this seried paratactic presentation of things, is found in many parts of the Bible, in epic sagas, in much poetry, and in the prose of Ernest Hemingway. Everyone likes to say that Hemingway’s style gets its power from the “iceberg theory.” This is Hemingway’s claim, in Death in the Afternoon, that If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Yet, as Robert Paul Lamb points out, in his excellent study, Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story, as a total explanation of Hemingway’s distinctiveness, the iceberg theory is very disappointing. All writers omit needless information, even big talkers like Virginia Woolf and William Shakespeare, and all 25 good writers hint at more than they state. And some of Hemingway’s most famous icebergs are actually bogus, such as the short story “Out of Season,” in which Hemingway, years after the story was published, claimed the reader could sense that the Italian guide, Peduzzi, would later hang himself—but, as Lamb points out, Peduzzi was based on a real person, and while that real person did indeed later hang himself, he had not yet done so while Hemingway was writing about him. No, what in fact gives Hemingway’s prose its signature ring is not the iceberg theory, but what Richard Lanham calls his “consistent, philosophically reasoned” paratactic style. This style omits explanations (frequently), and emotional reactions (almost always). Here is the opening of Hemingway’s famous short story, “Cat in the Rain.” There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room. Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and the war monument. There were big palms and green benches in the public garden. In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the palms grew and the bright colours of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea. Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of bronze and glistened in the rain. It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees. 26 Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor cars were gone from the square by the war monument. Across the square in the doorway of the cafe a waiter stood looking out at the empty square. The American wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under their window a cat was crouching under one of the dripping green tables. Notice, in the first sentence, how Hemingway chooses the word “stopping,” and not “staying,” and what the word suggests about his couple. See how he uses propositions to place his images, and how those prepositions add detail to what seems such bare prose. The use of “up” in “Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument” almost shows us a real Italian family, their necks craning. And the sentence, “Across the square in the doorway of the cafe a waiter stood looking out at the empty square” gives us the uncanny sequence of getting the American wife’s viewpoint of the cafe’s doorway, and the waiter, in that doorway, and what he sees (“the empty square”). We get a lot for such plain words. And notice how Hemingway zooms his focus in once the rain begins. Before the rain, the scene is described from a distance. After it, the wife’s eyes give us a closer view: “The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel paths.”

Hypotaxis

If parataxis is the style of writing where clauses and sentences are laid out one after another, with no connecting terms to explain how they relate, the opposite style is hypotaxis, where the connections between ideas are written down, where one idea is “subordinated” to another. If the essay you’re reading is full of ifs and becauses and therefores -- it’s hypotactic. Hypotaxis is the standard style, therefore, for essays and arguments. Here is Hemingway, for instance, critiquing the owners of pets, in Death in the Afternoon: I believe, after experience and observation, that those people who identify themselves with animals, that is, the almost professional lovers of dogs, and other beasts, are capable of greater cruelty to human beings than those who do not iden- 29 tity themselves readily with animals. Hypotaxis is powerful. Merely saying “because,” even if what follows is nonsense, can often be persuasive. The scholar Northrop Frye, in his amazing opus Words with Power, suggested that the rise of “dialectical” writing—hypotactic writing—enabled the rise of court bureaucracies and kingdoms in the ancient world. This kind of language gave its speaker authority, logic, even inevitablity, offering a semi-magical power over its audience, the power of compulsion. There is no state without hypotaxis. Essay Four: Hypotaxis. Because of the power of hypotaxis, one has to think before one can disagree with Hemingway’s claim about those horrible dog-lovers, even if one has never seen a dog-lover slap a child. The reader’s attention is caught by how Hemingway’s sentence promises and holds back, moving forward only to pause and elaborate again. Powerful hypotaxis delays gratification of understanding, setting up hooks (if... because…), implying pay offs which the reader scans forward to reach. This suggests the second advantage of hypotactic writing: it reads quickly. Hypotactic structures accelerate the reader through the text. Hypotaxis clarifies the relationship between ideas, so a reader doesn’t have to pause to figure out how the two parts connect. It also embeds promises into the sentence, the paragraph, the essay. If you read the 30 first part of the sentence, you’ll get the answer in the second part. Because you saw a “because” in the beginning of the sentence, you know an explanation is coming soon. Inside his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King creates one incredible sentence made of many “when” clauses. “Whens” begin each main clause, “ands” extend some of them, and “and sees” coordinate the longest series of elaborations. The parallelism ensures that the sentence keeps rushing forward on its terrible course. Here is merely the first half of his sentence: Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality

Kernels

Can we pause for a second? We’ve been talking a lot about sentences. But what is a sentence? There are three explanations that make sense to me. 1. “A sentence is a complete idea.” This suggests that every sentence advances one major thought. Even if the sentence is fifty words long, it all ends up presenting a single unified statement to the reader. I’ve never felt much helped by this definition. It may be true, but it’s hard to know how one could disprove it, and it’s not much of a guide to how to write a sentence. 2. “A sentence is a breath.” There seems to be a connection between reading, between breathing, and the period / full stop at the sentence’s end. People who are good public speakers often seem to pause with the end of a sentence. So a sentence should 33 bear some resemblance to how we speak, how we breathe. 3. “A sentence contains a clause.” This is the boring grammatical answer. It seems like a fairly pointless observation. But it is surprisingly useful. Every sentence contains a clause. This seems like a simple idea. It’s like saying that a car can contain many things, but unless it contains an engine, it isn’t a car: just a very expensive chair. Googling the question, “What is a clause?” one finds the basic idea repeated everywhere— A clause contains a subject and a predicate In other words, a clause has a subject and a verb (“Jesus wept”), a simple combination of a doer and the thing done. Essay Five: Clauses and Sentence Kernels. The clause is the heart of the sentence, the essential engine. We can sense this when we look at a long, complicated sentence like In a sleepy suburb of London, last Tuesday, my old friend Tim—a lovely, sweet man—killed his landlord with a hammer, and then called me to ask what he should do next. The main idea is clearly Tim’s murder of his landlord. He is the doer, the murder the thing done. The first part merely sets the scene (a sub- 34 urb of London, last Tuesday) and the rest of the sentence (after the “hammer”) hangs off his act, explains it, situates it. The only tricky rule with clauses is that if you have more than one in a sentence, you have to specific the relationship between them. You can’t write “The company’s stock fell the CEO was fired.” That will look jarring to many readers’ eyes. Instead, you either have to link the clauses paratactically, with an “and” or something similar, or hypotactically, by adding a word like “because”or “after.” “The stock fell because the CEO was fired.” The word “because,” in the above sentence, weakens the second clause, makes it “dependent” on the first -- because it can’t stand alone any more. “Because the CEO was fired” looks weird as a sentence of written English; the word “because” specifies that the second clause is dependent on the first. In Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte calls independent clauses “kernel sentences,” implying that they are the essential parts of sentences. Indeed, if you keep all your sentences down to the kernel, you will probably not confuse your reader, thought you may bore her. 35 It was a sunny day. Lots of children were eating ice cream. I hadn’t eaten breakfast. My mum didn’t buy me an ice cream. We played in the park. We threw a frisbee. We counted clouds. We played hide and seek lots of times. I was hungry. My stomach hurt. My mum’s eyes were very bright. Using this idea of independent clauses as the kernels of sentences, we can distinguish between writers who stress the kernel, and those that obscure it. For the former, one immediately thinks of the American minimalists, of writers such as Grace Paley. Here is the opening section of her story, “Wants.” I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them. The librarian said $32 even and you’ve owed it for eighteen years. I didn’t deny anything. Because I don’t understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away. In this section we see many sentences with only one clause, only two subordinating terms (“so” and “because”) and only two cases of “and.” When the narrator says, “Because I don’t understand how time passes,” we believe her, because her prose suggests a mind constantly surprised by the world’s thereness, far too surprised to interpret it much. In contrast, in the sentences of a more byzantine writer like M.R. 36 James, the famous teller of ghost stories, a reader is forced to search through masses of sentence-stuff for the main idea. This is the opening sentence of “The Mezzotint,” Some time ago I believe I had the pleasure of telling you the story of an adventure which happened to a friend of mine by the name of Dennistoun, during his pursuit of objects of art for the museum at Cambridge. This sounds like someone telling an old story, someone in no particular hurry, and the main idea, if there is one, is all but buried—“I have already told you Dennistoun’s story.” Virginia Tufte proposes that there are four types of sentence kernel, and (this is interesting) that these four options can be ranked in terms of “energy.” The four types of kernel are: 1. Clauses with “be” (is, are, were etc). The hills are dark to the east. 2. Clauses with “linking” verbs such as become, seems, resembles. His dog slowly became tetchy with age. 3. Clauses with intransitive verbs (lacking an object). Jane cried so hard that night.

Phrases

Sentence kernels are interesting in their own right, but they become most useful when combined in sentences with another kind of grammatical object, the modifying phrase. Phrases are usually named after the word that begins them. A prepositional phrase, for instance, begins with a preposition: in the castle, by the lake, at night, with the dead King. A phrase is kind of a weakened clause. It lacks either a subject or a verb, or both. This weakness, however, makes it versatile. The remarkable thing about adding phrases to a kernel clause is that these phrases can go anywhere. This is not true of adjectives or relative clauses (that… who… etc), which must be put close to the noun they modify. If, for example, I write “The man who had only one eye threw away the ugly baby’s sup- 39 per,” then the “who” bit of the sentence must stay after “man,” and “ugly” must stay before “baby”—or the sentence means something very different. But phrases contained by commas have the freedom to go anywhere, and so are therefore called “free modifiers.” They can range all over the sentence, adding details and elaborating images. Essay Six: Phrases and branching sentences. Because of their freedom, it can be hard to put clauses and their allied modifying phrases into categories. Tufte divides them into left-branching, right-branching, and mid-branching, depending on where the modifiers are. This is tricky to explain but easy to demonstrate with examples. For example, if we start with the kernel clause The prince raised the sword. the sentence can either stop there, or branch right, adding detail after the main clause: The prince raised the sword in both hands, grinning with madness. Or branch left, adding information before the clause: Clutching the hilt in both hands, grinning with madness, the 40 prince raised the sword. Or branch in the middle of the clause: The prince, clutching the hilt in both hands, grinning with madness, raised the sword. There is potentially no limit to these additions: The man cut down the tree, sweating in the noon heat, his back bent, his arms aching from the rusty axe’s weight, desperate for money, knowing the gringo tourists would pay a good price for the wood. Does this sound exciting? I think it is. Tufte’s idea of “branching sentences,” combining a kernel clause with one or more modifiers, allows us to imagine all kinds of rich, detailed sentences. The sentence you just read, for instance, was mid-branching. There was a phrase (“combining a kernel...”) between the subject and its verb. And I don’t think you found it hard to read, or follow. What kind of phrases are there? Lots. If we pick a simple kernel, like “I threw the ball,” then we can add all kinds of modifiers to it. I threw the ball in the dark courtyard. I threw the ball red with rage. I threw the ball, my fingers sore and aching. I threw the ball, hoping to hit the dog. 41 I threw the ball, angered by the CEO’s laughter. I threw the ball, as if possessed by a giant’s strength. For many writers, a technical holy grail is the ability to merge the needs of action and description. We want to keep the story moving at the same time as we keep it vivid in the reader’s mental eye, and we no longer have the Victorian luxury of long paragraphs of exposition. We need to do both things at once. A sentence composed of a kernel clause and one or two free modifiers enables a writer to push a story’s action forward while seamlessly adding in sensory details (via the modifying phrases), and for this reason, according to the rhetorician Francis Christensen, it became the primary sentence of American writers in the early twentieth century, the one most useful to their art—and the one least understood by writing textbooks ever since. So, rather than the slightly clumsy: The prince asked me to introduce myself and my companions. His eyes bulged with the intensity of madness. We can instead write: The prince asked me to introduce myself and my companions, his eyes bulging with the intensity of madness.

Accumulation

To recap the last two lessons: 1. Independent clauses can be seen as the kernels of bigger, more complicated sentences. A clause, containing a subject and a verb, an actor and an act, is necessary to make a complete sentence in English, and so one can strip out everything else, and just see the kerne, the sentence’s seed, its starting point. She poured the coffee. The leaves were green. 2. In English, we can’t separate two independent clauses by a comma—teachers call that a “comma splice.” But we can join phrases to independent clauses, simply by separating the clause and the phrase with a comma. As a result, a kernel clause can branch off in various directions, depending on where you put the modifying phrases. 44 She poured the coffee, glaring at me in disgust. The kernel is in bold, and the phrase in italics. The kernel is at the start of the sentence, and it “branches” right, being modified by the phrase that follows it. Or, if that didn’t feel right, you could “branch” left, putting the modifier first: Glaring at me in disgust, she poured the coffee. These phrases can go almost anywhere in the sentence, and so they are also called “free modifiers.” The dog, a wheezy, tired old thing, heard nothing. Perhaps this seems like basic stuff. Not to Francis Christensen, whose observation of the use of these techniques in 20th century American fiction led him to create firstly an entire system for teaching better writing, called the “cumulative sentence,” and a radical way of re-seeing how creative writing (in the loosest sense of the term) works. Christensen’s “cumulative sentence” works, he argued, on four main principles. 1. We are all told that good writing relies on brevity, simplicity, paring our sentences down to the most essential nouns and verbs. Suspect adjectives, dread adverbs, disdain the unspecific noun. But this 45 is bad advice. We should instead see writing as a process of addition, not subtraction. Start from a short kernel clause, and begin to modify it, adding phrases as you go, rethinking your very meaning and intent as the sentence develops. 2. Once you begin to add modifications, you must put them somewhere in relation to the main clause—before, after, or within it. Therefore, the second principle is one of direction. Christensen gives this example of what he means: The main clause, which may or may not have a sentence modifier before it, advances the discussion; but the additions move backward, as in this clause, to modify the statement of the main clause or more often to explicate or exemplify it, so that the sentence has a flowing and ebbing movement, advancing to a new position and then pausing to consolidate it, leaping and lingering as the popular ballad does. The modifier “as in this clause” effectively delays the reader, telling her to look again at the preceding clause, while “to modify the statement…” takes the argument forward, going onwards with conclusions and results. 3. In every piece of the sentence, a writer chooses what level of detail or generality to focus on, either abstract and broad, concrete and 46 specific. That focus can change from clause to phrase, from phrase to phrase, with a writer zooming in and out, moving from sight to insight. It was one of those ruined Honda Civics you saw all over the estate, its front wheels missing, moss in the grill. 4. Also at every level, a writer decides how much texture to give a sentence. Should the clause be decked out with modifying phrases, adverbs, adjectives, or should it be left bare? A skilled writer can communicate much to a reader by this choice, keeping certain sections simple and direct, others densely foliaged. Christensen suggests that variety in texture, however an individual writer’s style achieves this, is the road to excellent writing. This is a radical way for writers to re-examine their sentence craft. Suppose you are a writer of narrative or exposition, and you have heard a thousand times to “be specific!” or to “use strong verbs!” and one day you find that you have written: The leaves were green. Clearly this is terrible sentence by those rules. Perhaps you start adding adjectives and adverbs to aid the specificity: The big five-spoked sweetgum leaves were joyfully green. 47 Hmm. This is only sort of an improvement. Perhaps you should have fixed the verb: The leaves greened in the dawn. The problem with both these solutions is that they feel so heavy handed. Of course, there are genius stylists out there, and if you are one of them you can make anything work—but Christensen’s outlook offers another way. In his “generative rhetoric,” there’s nothing wrong with your original sentence. Keep it as it was. Instead, try to write the simplest independent clause you can, then start to modify it. Instead of trying to jam all your detail and brilliance into the reader’s eye/ear in one go, try to see a sentence as something unfolding in time, altering a reader’s perception as it goes on, as varied as it needs to be—sometimes focused, sometimes abstract, sometimes dazzlingly rich, sometimes as plain as a walk in the park with the person you love. Writing this way also allows you to think about what you’re doing as the writing happens, just as the reader has time to think while reading it. It is “generative” because it encourages new ideas, urging you on to new modifications, helping you to ask yourself “how does my character smile when she’s cross at her son?”—rather than sending you back to the thesaurus for another synonym for “smile.” Christensen offers this writing exercise—start with a few basic clauses, the most simple you can think of, absolutely the least artsy and profound stuff you can imagine, like: 48 The leaves were green. She poured the coffee. He smiled at his son. And then treat that kernel as the start

Stress

If we really want readers to notice our prose, we can amplify the sonic qualities of our words, by creating patterns of similar sounds. To create similarities in the opening consonants of words is called alliteration (the pink penguin plodded); to create similarities in vowels is called assonance (the reddish eddies meddled with Ted); similarities in word endings is called rhyme. To describe similarities in rhythm, we must first, however, understand the crucial idea of stress. English is a language heavily dependent on syllable stress. Native speakers of English don’t notice it because it’s so natural, and only when we travel across the Atlantic (in either direction) do we become aware that some words can be stressed differently. 50 In London, the word “garage” is stressed on the first syllable: GARige. In New Jersey, it’s more like ga-RARGE. AD-ult versus a-DULT. Essay Eight: Stress and Flow Not all languages do this, this variety in stress; but all formal English poetry, and much song, is based around creating a regular alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables. Although things get complicated fast when thinking about stress, it’s possible to say, for the purposes of this essay, that certain words are generally unstressed in English: pronouns (she, he, it), conjunctions (and, if, then), and articles (the, a) And certain words generally are stressed (in at least one of their syllables): nouns, verbs (‘be’ verbs are pretty close to unstressed, however), adjectives, and adverbs. As a result, there is a real sonic difference between writing: The man was huge and tough and mean. and The man was huge, tough, mean. 51 The first sentence is practically sung. I don’t feel.

Lambs

Look at the poem’s first line, and count the stresses. The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The pattern of five stresses, five unstresses, is not perfectly followed through the poem, but it is followed enough that we hear it, and come to expect it. The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Can you see / hear the pattern of one unstress followed by one stress? I can only promise that marking stressed syllables on lines of verse is one of the most enjoyable activities one can have alone. 52 If you’re not a poet, why is syllable stress important? One reason is that stress can add emphasis. David Jauss, in his amazing essay, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow,” demonstrates this with the opening paragraph of D.H. Lawrence’s first published story, “The Odour of Chrysanthemums.” This paragraph is one of the more famous in literary history. The legend goes that, when the famous author editor Ford Maddox Ford read this paragraph, having picked the unknown writer’s story from the slush pile, he not only approved Lawrence’s story for publication, but announced the discovery of a major new writer. Here it is: 53 The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full wagons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black wagons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up. 54 Jauss first points out the smoothness of the paragraph’s flow, and suggests that this smoothness comes from its highly varied sentence structures and openers. Lawrence drastically varies how he opens his sentences, how long they are, and the components they contain. Essay Nine: Iambs and beats. But more than the easy flow, the stresses in the paragraph seem placed to reflect and embody its meaning. Jauss quotes this one long sentence: The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black wagons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. Jauss then shows how, on the one hand, the description of the train as it is passing is densely stressed, while the description of its departure is stressed more sparsely. Jauss hears three levels of stress in this prose—unstressed, stressed, heavily stressed: 55 The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black wagons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney The reader shares the woman’s fright as the train passes, and her return to calm as it departs. Once you start to see and hear rhythm in prose, it becomes a beautiful thing. It is everywhere. There is the pleasure of the smoothly cadenced magazine headline, the ring of a story’s sentence closing perfectly to its beat. Elaine Scarry, in her essay On Beauty and Being Just, points out that the rhythm of We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, supports, or even proves, its meaning. How? The first part of the sentence earnestly plods through six mono-syllables, then speeds to end with the rapid four syllables of “self-evident”; the second part repeats this rhythm, starting slow and ending rapid. Rhythmically, the two parts are so similar that their claims feel linked, that “we” are the “equal men” and what is “self-ev- 56 ident” is how all are “equal.” English is a language influenced by centuries of rhythmically regular poetry, and prose writers can sneak those rhythms into their work. The metre considered the closest to regular prose or normal English speech is the “blank” (non-rhyming) iambic pentameter line, the line of Shakespeare and Tennyson. An iamb means a pair of beats, with the weak beat first, then a strong one; pentameter means five of these pairs per line. For days I see her car across the street. Or, the stresses in bold: For days I see her car across the street. Look at the whole sentence by Amy Hempel, from her story, “Chuch Cancels Cow,” and see how the opening, a perfect five-beat pentameter, gets played with and messed up by what follows. For days I see her car across the street, parked on the little-used access road, her at the wheel just watching my house where my dog patrols the yard, unmistakable dog. How can prose writers take advantage of pentameter patterns? One option is to write entirely in loose pentameters, sticking a comma or a full stop after every fifth strong beat. Faulkner, in Absalom, Absalom, apparently does this, to a degree. The other option is to listen out for 57 iambic possibilities as you write,

Conseqution

In everyday life, prose is largely silent. We are taught to scan words without much mouth or tongue-if, during our reading, we breathed out the “w” in “way,” we would seem quite strange, or not wholly proficient. We all have favourite words whose musicality we enjoy, yet we are also able to comprehend whole legal documents without becoming conscious of the jostling soundy-ness contained in every syllable. However, skilled prose writers can force that awareness back, creating patterns of sound that reawaken the reader’s ear. Rhyme, for instance, is often too noticeable, and so is alliteration. The cheapest use of these techniques is to wave them in a reader’s face. Only-just-perceived sonic patterns can add an uncanny quality to sentences, a magical persuasive force, the way a musical score multiples the visual impact of a horror film. When Johnnie Cochran said, 59 If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit the rhyme suggested that there was a pre-existing connection between the two ideas, a connection that pre-dated Cochran’s coining of the phrase, some design principle of the universe. Gordon Lish, the famous editor, taught a technique for connecting sounds within a sentence: he called it “consecution.” The idea is that as you write each sentence, you look for sounds and fragments, within the words you have already put down, that you can repeat as the sentence develops, nears its end. Consecution, depending on how you carry it out, can seem artsy, stately, or uncanny. Gary Lutz describes this method in his seminal essay, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place”: Gordon Lish… instructed his students in a poetics of the sentence that emphasized what he called consecution: a recursive procedure by which one word pursues itself into its successor by discharging something from deep within itself into what follows. Consecution is like assonance or alliteration, then, but more flexible: you simply take something from the beginning of the sentence and repeat it as the sentence develops. It may sound ridiculous, but I often find a little consecution gives a sentence a strangely potent authority, as though it was a discovered thing, not something invented

Masterclass

To round up and conclude, I’d like to discuss one last sentence, the remarkable opening of Dan Simmon’s sci fi classic, Hyperion. Although its content is fantastical, the style offers much to study. Essay Ten: Masterclass Here is the novel’s opening sentence: The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below. Simmons does a lot in these 36 words. Firstly, in partial accordance with Strunk and White’s advice to put 62 the key word last, Simmons puts the most dramatic information last, saving until the end the menace of monsters gnashing their teeth. The sentence breaks into two significant parts at the word “while,” the word which separates the Consul’s world from that of the monsters. Prior to “while,” we are in his world of concerns, noting that the Steinway is “well-maintained,” but after it, we enter a world of inhuman rage and struggle. Notice that before “while,” there are only two verbs, and they are both bland (sat, played). After “while”, however, come another two verbs, and they are vivid and bold (surged, bellowed). This means that Simmons uses a noun-based style for the sentence’s first part, when describing the Consul’s static, serene, calm situation. He then switches to a more verb-based style for the alien world, to show its energy, its constant motion. The placement of verbs of differing strengths emphasises the precariousness of this future human civilisation, at once both powerful and fragile—which is the theme of Hyperion and its sequel. In terms of setting out its meaning, the sentence is quite paratactic, with no causal linkage offered (the monsters do not roar because of the piano), yet it remains well ordered. The two clauses describing the Consul use a parallel construction, each starting with a compact subject-verb that is modified with right-branching prepositional phrases. The prepositions in bold: The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony space- 63 ship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway The sentence is not technically cumulative, but these initial two clauses do adhere to Christensen’s vision of a sentence that starts off simply, and gets its specificity from the way the following phrases modify it. Additionally, the sentence’s sonic qualities alter at the “while” turning point. Before it, the sentence is quite sparsely stressed, largely due to its many long words and unstressed prepositional phrases. And while there is some assonance between, say, “ancient” and “maintained”, this sonic pattern is not so vivid. But after the “while,” the alliteration becomes pronounced, and the stress much more dense, warning us about dangers dimly seen. while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below Simmons also uses one, or maybe two, instances of “consecution,” the great feat of prose engineering beloved by Gordon Lish: where a word, or pieces of a word, after having entered a sentence once, reappear later in the same sentence, as if following underneath the passage of the text, looking for a chance to resurface. 64 In this sentence, “bellowed” reappears as “below,”

Resources

Resources (Note: some of the links here are afflialiate links: if you use the link to buy the book on Amazon, I get a small commission. This helps me pay for hosting this document and so on) Brooks Landon Strunk & white To the Lighthouse Green book Lanham prose Lutz believer Arts Matters hemingway Towards a new rhetorical Steven fry Florida schutt