IN HIS THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS (1897), Joseph Conrad wrote: ‘My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.’
This is something to aim for in all sorts of writing. What distinguishes Conrad’s three goals is that they seek to bring writing as close as possible to the world it describes. Here, laid plain, is the root of the familiar style-guide injunctions to prefer the concrete to the abstract.
As I’ve discussed, even when you read silently you are activating parts of your brain associated with sound and vision. Language reaches deftly into the abstract – but it does so from concrete, embodied roots in sounds and images. It also, as any number of business communications manuals testify, does so most compellingly when it’s rooted in a narrative. People respond to images and stories. They respond to things that give a human face to abstract ideas or large movements.
When politicians talk about the structural reform of large bureaucracies, for instance, or the virtues of state versus private provision of services – they invariably do so through case studies. In his first speech to the joint session of the houses of Congress, President Trump drew his audience’s attention to the presence among them of Megan Crowley, a young woman who had survived a potentially fatal disease. President Trump sketched in the story of her father’s fight to get her the medical care she needed, and used her example to introduce his desire to deregulate the US’s Food and Drug Administration: ‘our slow and burdensome approval process […] keeps too many advances, like the one that saved Megan’s life, from reaching those in need’.
In writing, you are often seeking a Megan Crowley. The case might not always be so emotive. But something general will almost always be most effectively expressed if it’s rooted in the particular, in what’s sometimes called ‘lived experience’.
Steve Jobs’s 2005 commencement address at Stanford University has had a viral afterlife on the internet. He began it this way:
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
‘I want to tell you a story.’ Instantly, our ears prick up. Why is storytelling so effective? In the first place, it offers a purchase for human sympathy or identification. When we hear of a little girl waiting for an operation, or of a frog kissed by a princess, we insert ourselves into the story. We imagine what it’s like to be that little girl, or her parents; we are that frog, or that princess. Identification is the heart of persuasion.
Also, simply, we want to know what happens next. A story is an attention-getting strategy. If we see a rifle hanging on the wall in chapter one, as Chekhov said, ‘in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off’. The moment you introduce that glimpse of the rifle, you have your audience. If you describe someone in peril, or on the horns of a dilemma, the audience wants to know how the situation will resolve itself. How does the damsel escape from the railway tracks? Which suitor will the princess choose?
There’s a larger point, too. Stories are a way of giving shape to experience. They imply order and causation. In life, things often happen at random. In stories, they tend to happen for a reason. A reader can be confident that if Harry Potter dies, it’ll be as part of a dramatically satisfying face-off with Lord Voldemort rather than because he trips over a loose paving stone a quarter of the way through book four, tumbles into a well and breaks his stupid neck. The closing scene of Easy Rider – in which some random redneck road users we’ve never seen before simply blow the protagonists away and drive off – is a deliberately shocking challenge to our expectations of narrative.
Nicola Barker’s novel The Yips puts it well. One character asks another what her philosophy is. ‘No philosophy,’ she replies. ‘No guidance. No structure. No pay-off. No real consequences. Just stuff and then more stuff.’
‘Stuff?’ the first character asks.
‘Yeah, stuff. Like, here’s some stuff, here’s some other stuff, here’s some more stuff. Just stuff – more and more stuff, different kinds of stuff which is really only the same stuff but in different colours and with different names; stuff stacked up on top of itself in these huge, messy piles …’
Those huge messy piles are real life. Stories are a way of ordering them. And in a persuasive situation, a well-told story can borrow the promise of order implicit in the very idea of narrative. If the man who opened the tomb of Tutankhamun dies six months later of blood-poisoning, the instinct is to find a connection between the two things. Narrative logic asks us to do so – rather, say, than to draw the soberer conclusion that archaeological success and septicaemia are unrelated issues.
Literary theorists may bicker over the distinction between an anecdote and a parable, or between realism and allegory. But readers tend to have a muzzier sense of it. If someone tells us a story we’ll naturally look for ways in which the shape of that story is archetypal, reflecting a pattern of experience or a larger meaning. As Dale Carnegie put it, ‘The great truths of the world have often been couched in fascinating stories.’
Jobs’s three stories – one of them about ‘connecting the dots’, one about ‘love and loss’ and one about ‘death’ – were all expressly archetypal: he presented the stories about himself as stories about all of us.* So, again, stories are a way of establishing ethos: a common identity. The American scholar Brené Brown has called stories ‘data with a soul’.
The Ancients used the term enargia to describe the way in which a speaker or writer builds a visual or sensual image out of words. Here is a close – sometimes a kissing – cousin of the storytelling instinct. Your readers will invest in the story you tell, or the scene you describe, if the details seem to make it tangible. Those details will be sensory: not only the look of something but the taste, the feel, the smell of a scene.
One example should suffice. In his address to a Democratic rally in Manassas, Virginia on the eve of the 2016 US presidential election, Barack Obama told a story about his own presidential run in 2008. The story told how in the hopes of securing an endorsement, he had promised to visit the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. He had been campaigning all over the country. He arrived in South Carolina at midnight and reached the hotel at around one in the morning. He was exhausted. But just as he went to bed an aide tapped him on the shoulder and reminded him – he’d forgotten – that he had to be up at six in the morning to drive to Greenwood.
Obama described waking up the next morning:
I feel terrible. I’m exhausted. Think I’m coming down with a cold. I open up the curtains. It’s pouring down rain outside. Pouring down rain. Horrible day. I make myself some coffee and I get the newspaper outside my door and open it up. There’s a bad story about me in the New York Times. I get dressed, shave, walk out, just kinda still groggy, still staggering … my umbrella blows open. That ever happen to you? I get soaked. Soaked! I’m just – soaked …
Of course, this is a spoken rather than a written enargia. Many of its features – the present-tense narration, the repetitions, the hand gestures and facial expressions – are peculiar to its effect as speech. But the principle holds. The audience doesn’t, on a logical level, need to know about his coffee, his shave, the newspaper. They don’t need to know he had a cold eight years ago, or that the weather that day was bad. But they are drawn in – ‘that ever happen to you?’ makes it explicit. The story feels real. It’s available to inhabit. You know what that scene is like, and – the vital bit – you identify with the speaker. You’re going with him to Greenwood that day – and when you get there you will be more invested in the story he went on to tell about an inspiring campaign volunteer whose energy helped to get a weary Obama back in the game.
Putting one thing in another’s place – a word for a thing – is the very essence of language. So metaphor, which does that at the level of the image or idea, is something we respond to naturally.
An analogy can add something other than vividness, though. It can render unfamiliar arguments in familiar terms, and abstract ones in concrete terms. The late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, came up with a good example. As a firm atheist, he wanted to argue against the apparently commonsensical arguments of believers in ‘intelligent design’. Their case is that human beings are so perfectly adapted to their environment, and the world around us so complex and interdependent, that it must have been designed that way. He offered the following analogy:
This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in – an interesting hole I find myself in – fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well. It must have been made to have me in it!’
Here’s something that, in the first place, is funny. Making your audience laugh is a way of hot-wiring their goodwill. But also it takes a complicated and rather airy argument about intentionality and gives it an absurdist twist. Adams not only mocks the pride implicit in the intelligent design argument – offering the attractively humble notion that humans should be considered as no more special than a puddle of water – but he implies that there’s topsy-turvy thinking behind it. Why should we assume, because we’re well-fitted to our surroundings, that the surroundings have been arranged to suit us rather than vice versa?
The abstractions of high finance are likewise susceptible. The veteran investor Warren Buffett, talking about the ebullience of markets in unproven tech stocks and complex artificial financial instruments, offered the excellently aphoristic: ‘Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.’
Metaphor and analogy are particularly useful – indeed, when it comes to the abstractions of advanced physics or mathematics, essential – to science writers. As Carlo Rovelli writes: ‘Science begins with a vision. Scientific thought is fed by the capacity to “see” things differently.’ Very few of us can master the equations that underpin the theory of general relativity – but we can apprehend the curvature of space-time when we transpose four dimensions into three. A heavy ball sits on a trampoline; roll a ping-pong ball past it and the curvature of the trampoline’s surface will affect the path the lighter ball takes. There’s gravity for you.
And there have been fewer more crisp evocations of chaos theory, Time’s Arrow and the second law of thermodynamics than Tom Stoppard’s in Arcadia:
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
Metaphor and analogy are powerful juju. But they should be used with caution, too. Godwin’s Law – that the longer an online discussion grows, the closer to certain it becomes that a comparison involving Nazism or Hitler will be made – provides only the most obvious instance of why. When you’re comparing one thing with another, bear in mind that you bring into the comparison all of the penumbral associations of your comparator. That may not be a problem when your comparator is rice pudding. It will be more inflammatory when there’s an ethical or personal dimension.
Saying that a government proposing a large programme of public works to kickstart the economy has something in common with Hitler’s Germany might be technically correct, but it will cause immediate offence. Hitler comes loaded with a whole wagon-train of baggage – and it’s hard to separate his sort-of Keynesianism from his immediate associations with megalomania, mass-murder, open-air shouting and stupid moustaches.
The problem with an analogy or a metaphor is that it is, necessarily, a falsification. When politicians talk about macroeconomics in terms of household budgets – as, for instance, Mrs Thatcher liked to – they present an attractive and easily comprehensible analogy. But, as proper economists explain, it doesn’t work like that at all. The same goes for the case study or illustrative example. As science-minded people sometimes like to say, ‘the plural of anecdote is not data’.*
So you’ll want to pick your battles. But there’s no question that the humanising example, the memorable analogy or the resonant story can do a lot of heavy lifting. In his poem ‘A Meditation on John Constable’, Charles Tomlinson wrote: ‘The artist lies/ For the improvement of truth. Believe him.’
‘Rhythm. A play of syllables and even sounds. I hear sounds in a sort of indescribable way as I write.’ – Don DeLillo
Even silent reading, both neuroscience and experience tell us, is an auditory experience. When we talk about cadence in prose we’re talking about the equivalent of metre in poetry: the sounds of the words. When we say something is ‘well-written’, a very large part of that will be to do with how it sounds. Cadence is prose rhythm. And it’s a hugely important aspect of writing, but it’s also one of the hardest ones to discuss in a formal way.
Prose doesn’t scan in the metronomic way that traditional verse does. The basic iambic beat of English verse is ‘de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum’, and if you wrote like that in prose it would sound ridiculous. But prose does have its pauses and its rushes and its arpeggios. Punctuation, as I discussed in my chapter on the subject earlier, has its origins as a means of marking pauses in reading out loud – and that remains part of what it does.
So where you put the commas, where you break sentences, whether you use polysyllables or short words … all will have an effect on the ease and fluency of reading. A good writer doesn’t just have a brain: he or she has an ear. The more you read and the more you write, the better that ear will get. A sentence will come to feel right.
But – as cannot be said too often – that ear needs training. Experienced composers can read music and ‘hear’ the sounds in their heads. Experienced writers, likewise. But many, many very experienced writers still use a simple technique for, as it were, double-checking: they read what they have written out loud. If you have time to do so once you’ve completed a draft, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
An awkward separation of subject and verb, for instance, becomes particularly stark when read aloud: you’ll find your voice holding off as your brain waits for the second shoe to drop. You may even find – if there are enough subordinate clauses getting in the way of the main event; if, as in this sentence, there’s a great long digression separating the word ‘find’ from the question of what it is that you’re eventually going to find – that you run out of breath trying to get through the wretched thing.
Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan, has said: ‘Once you’ve finished the first draft of your speech – stand up and speak it aloud. Where you falter, alter.’ That applies especially to speeches, of course: in that case you’re trying to produce something that’s hard to stumble over when spoken aloud. Tongue-twisters such as ‘red lorry, yellow lorry’ are easier on the page than in the mouth. But it is also good advice to the prose writer. There is a developmental connection between reading aloud and reading silently – and there is a neurological one too.
The way you shape sentences can slow things down or speed them up. Right-branching sentences, particularly short ones, make it easier – as we’ve noted – for the reader to skip through from one to another. But you can also, sometimes, use a subclause or a parenthesis as a way of holding off the end of a sentence – giving it an extra sense of authority and satisfaction when the final words come in to land.
Cadence is the main reason that many of the standard pieces of writers’ advice will lead you astray if you follow them with mechanical uniformity. Yes: a right-branching sentence with the subject and verb up front is easier to parse. But if every sentence in your work is syntactically identical, the reader’s brain hears it as monotonous – and switches off. There’s no bounce, no elasticity, no sense of sentences flowing one to the other. Yes: you should aim to remove unnecessary words. But sometimes a word may have a rhythmic rather than a semantic value. Syntheton, where you place two words or phrases alongside each other – ‘strength and fortitude’; ‘men and women’ – adds to the gravity of a sentence or clause and often does not add much to its meaning. And yes: short sentences are easier to digest than long ones. But if all your sentences are short you will sound like a Janet-and-John book.
Just as in the case of poetic rhythm and music, where the reading brain starts to get excited is in that sweet spot between predictability and variation. Order without variation is monotony; variation without order – without a pattern to test it against – is white noise. This makes sense: we are, by evolution, pattern-seeking animals. We are wired to derive general rules from the world around us, and then to see how our predictions hold up in particular circumstances.
So varying sentence structure and sentence length – not wildly, but enough to keep the reader’s attention – is important. Sentences don’t stand alone: like their author and their readers, they have a relationship with their neigh-bours. A piece of text should not be a list of independent assertions made in sequence. Prose aims to capture the movement of thought – and when we think, we hesitate, qualify, assert, digress, re-emphasise. Using transitions from sentence to sentence – which may mean beginning a sentence with a conjunction; knock yourself out – helps to give pattern to your work. A perfectly constructed simple sentence of the subject-verb-object form might be ideal in one spot, or in isolation. But if it comes at the end of a run of six sentences taking the exact same form, it can kill the flow stone dead.
Let’s look, to see a really well-managed cadence, at one of the most celebrated sentences in the language. Here’s the last line of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, which describes the life of anonymous goodness that Eliot’s heroine Dorothea would go on to lead after the reader leaves her:
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
It’s a bit of a sentence to fight through. (‘Her being’, for instance, is a gerund, a verbal noun, meaning her existence: that could cause a hiccup if you read ‘her being on those around her’ as a participial phrase meaning ‘her having been on those around her’, as if she were somehow riding her neighbours like horses.)
Few people would risk such a long complex-compound sentence now, and on the read-aloud test it might flummox all but a circular breather. Yet it sends you away with a poignant sense of human interconnectedness and how a little life can fit in to the whole scope of history.
There’s a lot going on there. It uses a time-shift – so, suddenly, we’re leaving the thick of the novel’s action and looking back on it as an event in history: the living Dorothea we met, and whose daily struggles we followed, is now a figure from the distant past – a tiny thread in the historical tapestry. There’s that intimate and moving shift in register – from the ornate and even pompous-seeming ‘incalculably diffusive’* to the almost childlike ‘things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been’.
But the real payoff is in large part a rhythmic effect: it’s precisely because you battle through the bulk of the sentence that the dying fall of the last clause is so effective. It’s a release. ‘And rest in unvisited tombs’ is an unstressed syllable, followed by two dactyls, followed by a single stressed syllable with a long open vowel. ‘And REST in unVISited TOMBS’: di DUM-diddy DUM-diddy DUM. That’s almost identical* in scansion – though it’s a world apart in effect – to the last line of a limerick. If I seem to be making too subtle a point, try rereading that sentence aloud, substituting ‘and who rest in tombs nobody visits’ for the last clause. It means exactly the same thing. And it does not fricking work.
There are some obvious points to make. One of them is about register. Sometimes, particularly if you are writing a memo rather than the last line of one the greatest novels in the language, you will want not to cultivate but to avoid the sort of cadence with which George Eliot ends Middlemarch. You don’t always want to sound musical. You may look for a simple declarative tone and prose rhythms that march rather than dance. But whether poetic or more prosy, the rhythm is there – and it’s worth attending to.
To go from the sublime to the ridiculous, let’s consider a more recent example. A review of a biography of the bad-tempered academic A. L. Rowse ended with this sentence:
This clear-sighted book emerges as the portrait of a deeply unhappy man: an erratic if sometimes brilliant scholar; a gifted memoirist; an indifferent poet and a first-class prick.
If that works, it’s not because of the justness or otherwise of the judgments on Rowse’s character. It’s because of the cadence: it ends strong. After winding wordily and perhaps a little pompously through the catalogue of his achievements, making careful distinctions in polysyllabic terms, it bangs home three stressed syllables in a row* – as well as leaving the register of quasi-academic evaluation for one of open insult.
Stressed syllables, especially in the closing words of a piece, matter to writers. In 2008, the Times journalist Giles Coren lost his rag completely† after one of his restaurant reviews was edited in a way he didn’t like. The angry email he sent to the sub-editors he suspected of being responsible, unfortunately for him, leaked onto the open internet and made everybody laugh a lot.
The thing he was really cross about was an edit made to what journalists call the payoff: ‘It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.’‡
What Coren wrote was:
I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.
What appeared in the magazine was:
I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh.
Spot the difference? Of course you did. They removed the word ‘a’ in his last sentence. One thing that annoyed Coren was that it blew a very subtle dirty joke: ‘a nosh’ has the secondary meaning of a blowjob, which ‘nosh’ (as a bare noun) doesn’t.
But the main thing that annoyed him was entirely to do with cadence. To quote his email:
And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed ‘a’ so that the stress that should have fallen on ‘nosh’ is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and I have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.
There’s plenty you can learn about cadence from even that little paragraph of (Coren’s words) ‘anger, real steaming fucking anger’. Look, for instance, at the punctuation of all those fucks. He should have capitalised the antepenultimate fuck, admittedly – again, written in haste – but had he separated all four with commas the effect would have been quite different.
As it is we get one, stark, ‘Fuck’. We get a beat pause from that full stop. Then – as if an illustration or development of the thought – we get a little fugal trio of fucks. A tricolon of fucks. The inner ear hears them rising in pitch and emphasis – either building back up to or surpassing the pitch of the first one. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’ wouldn’t have worked at all: too regular and flat. Nor would the pedestrian: ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.’ That’s like a shopping-list of fucks. Instead what we have is an almost perfect enactment in informal prose of Basil Fawlty going to work on his 1967 Austin Countryman with the branch of a tree. He hits it once. Pauses. Then goes into a little frenzy: three strikes of increasing savagery as the floodgates of his anger open.
There is one teeny-weeny point that bears raising. It’s that Coren is wrong, in this case, about unstressed syllables. ‘Nosh’ is going to be a stressed syllable whether or not it is preceded by ‘a’. Both versions of his sentence end in a stressed syllable: try pronouncing the second one without a stress on ‘nosh’ and see where you get.*
But he’s also right in two ways. The cadence of the sentence is altered, subtly, by the removal of that article. ‘… where to go for a nosh’ lands the stress with a xylophonic exactness on ‘nosh’ – ‘where to go for a NOSH’: diddy-dum diddy-DUM. That’s two anapaests. ‘… where to go for nosh’ is hardly barbaric – ‘diddy-dum di-dum’; an anapaest and an iamb – but it’s weaker. It is different. Not so different as, perhaps, to merit the savagery of his complaint. But different nonetheless.
And the second way he’s right is that, yes, what he informally calls ‘metre’ – formally, cadence – does matter. The difference between a sentence that really comes off and one that doesn’t may be just below the level of consciousness – but that’s where some of the profoundest work of prose is done.
Look again at George Eliot. Let us say that, as a sub-editor, I decided to follow through on my experiment above and alter the last line of Middlemarch so it ended,
and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in tombs nobody visits.
Not only do I very much doubt that it would have made its way into the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. I would also be quite unsurprised (her having been dead for nearly 140 years aside) to receive a letter from George Eliot: ‘It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written seven novels and I have never ended on an unstressed syllable.* Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
If all this seems excessively finickity – if making a fuss about something that most readers won’t notice consciously seems like a waste of your time – let’s look at another example.
In the run-up to the Scottish referendum campaign in 2014, the UK’s then Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander wrote a newspaper article making the case against Scotland’s leaving the UK. Keen to make clear, as part of his ethos appeal, that he was not some high-handed Sassenach imperialist, he wrote:
I am Scottish by birth, by choice and by aspiration.
That sounds good, doesn’t it? But it means absolutely nothing at all. If you’re Scottish by birth, by definition you have no choice about being Scottish. If you then say you’re Scottish by choice, you contradict yourself: you can’t be both. And then to say you’re Scottish by aspiration – since you aspire to be something that you are not – is to say that you’re not Scottish at all.
So this ringing phrase tells us at once that Mr Alexander had no choice about being Scottish, that he chose to be Scottish, and that he is not Scottish but wishes that he were. And yet a grown-up politician wrote this rubbish and sent it to a newspaper, and a grown-up newspaper editor put it in the paper, and grown-up newspaper readers nodded their way through it without turning a hair. Why? Because it actually works fine: it works fine because it sounds good. In that sentence sound is doing the work of sense.
It’s an example of the tricolon crescens, or rising tricolon. Here are three terms in a row.* The ‘rising’ part of that phrase describes a metrical effect: the third term (‘by aspiration’) has two more syllables in it than the previous terms (‘by birth’ and ‘by choice’). ‘Aspiration’ – dum-di-dum-dum – has a pleasing cadence that gives the sentence a feel of coming to a natural and dignified conclusion.†
They are placed syntactically and semantically in parallel – something reinforced by the redundant use of ‘by’ in each case, which also serves to swell the sentence, making it sound that bit grander. So though they contradict each other logically, they fall on the reader’s ear as if they are reinforcing each other.
In effect, Douglas Alexander is simply congratulating himself three times over on being Scottish. The message – even if the words are saying the opposite – is that he’s Scottish by good fortune, that he chooses to be Scottish, and that even if the first two things were not true he would still want to be Scottish.
So that’s why cadence matters. It can do more than just reinforce the sense of a sentence: it can create an impression of sense where none actually exists. I’m not suggesting you seek to use cadence as a substitute for sense yourself: only that you don’t underestimate how effective something subliminal can be.
The phrase ‘a figure of speech’ comes, originally, from the formal study of rhetoric. ‘Figure’ is the name given to all the decorative twists of language and argument that help make a piece of text memorable or persuasive. When you talk about a woman’s ‘figure’, you’re describing her shape; and it’s the same when you talk about figures in a text. Figures are ways of identifying structure in a piece of writing.
Over the centuries in which rhetoric was formally studied – and during which it was really the only toolkit we had for analysing language* – hundreds and hundreds of figures were identified. Sometimes called the ‘flowers of rhetoric’, these cover everything from the wider flow of an argument to the relationship between individual words in a sentence. They were, rather like flowers, given a number of Latin and Greek names – some overlapping – that sound abstruse to the modern ear.
I don’t suggest that you need to commit dozens of them to memory. If you take a stamp-collector’s interest in the difference between aposiopesis and anacoluthon, you do so with my entire approval – but the reason I want to discuss them here is to show how, whatever name you give them, the figures pervade even informal writing. If grammar structures your sentences for basic meaning, figuration puts an extra persuasive twist on them.
The figures can make the difference between something flat and structureless, and something tight and dynamic. Rather than asking your reader to make his or her own way, in dismal welly-boots, across the muddy field of your prose, you can instead offer stepping-stones, signposts, memorable landmarks and pleasantly maintained picnic areas. Thinking about structure doesn’t end, in other words, once you’ve been through the basics of sentence-surgery. Now comes the physiotherapy.
There follows a run-through of a handful of the basic figures. I’ll give their proper Greek or Latin names, but these are far less important for the purposes of this book than seeing how they work.
A number of different figures concern ways of using the number two. They deal with how you place two objects, two ideas, two clauses or two words in a relationship with each other. That relationship will sometimes involve logical opposition, sometimes rhythmic balance and sometimes complementarity – and sometimes more than one of those things at once.
Parallelism, say, is when you place two (or more) clauses side by side and give them a similar structure. ‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins …’ Apposition is when two clauses are in grammatical balance together: ‘My girlfriend, the light of my life, dropped the toaster in my bath one morning after she found her birth certificate in my bottom drawer.’
Antithesis, or contrast, is one of the basic moves for structuring either a sentence or a whole piece of work: on the one hand, and on the other. You’ll find it – giving a satisfying sense of balance – in a single sentence; but in certain types of writing it will govern the relationships between paragraphs or the basic see-sawing motion of the entire argument. Take these two verses of the hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
[–-]
The cold wind in the winter,
The pleasant summer sun,
The ripe fruits in the garden,−
He made them every one
The first two lines of each verse are offered as opposites; but in the literary and theological scheme of the hymn, they are also in parallel. We’re being offered not either/or but both/and. The divine order of nature reconciles opposites – so that the social estates of man give both of the first pair a place, and the fruits in the garden give both of the second pair a purpose. The phrases in which they appear are structurally similar.
So terms in antithesis, in its broadest use, don’t necessarily need to be mutually exclusive opposites – as in ‘give me liberty or give me death’. What we’re interested in here is the sense of balance, and that balance is as often to do with rhythm and syntactic structure as it is to do with the logic of what the phrases signify.
When he rejected the draft to fight in Vietnam, Muhammad Ali said: ‘Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? […] I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality.’
The central antithesis in the first sentence is the contrast between ‘brown people in Vietnam’ and ‘so-called Negro people in Louisville’ – but in the framework of the argument they are parallels rather than opposites. The Vietnamese peasant is, in Ali’s imaginative scheme, an ally to the black soldier sent to kill him: they share a common enemy.
It’s all about the effect on the ear. That second sentence contrasts ‘my religion, my people or myself’ with ‘those … fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality’. The contrast is made in the interests of emphasising not difference but kinship – and the syntactic parallel, those groups of three emotive terms, does that work in the rhythm and shape of the sentence.
It should be fairly easy to see how antithesis can be ramped up so that a binary structure at sentence level can become the principle for a whole essay or argument. In its most stark form this will be to reject one thing and endorse another – and to do so all the way through an argument. But more subtly it can follow the pattern that we see microscopically reproduced in ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’: on the one hand A, on the other B, but in combination or in resolution C. Or, if you like: thesis, antithesis, synthesis – the basic movement of Hegelian dialectic.
You may not think of your letter to Camden Council, querying a Penalty Charge Notice you picked up when parked on a double-yellow outside Marks & Spencer, as being an instance of the Hegelian dialectic in action – but in its small way it might well be.
Grouping things in three has an almost magical effect on the rhythmic authority of a given sentence or passage of writing. There’s a reason that political speeches are so frequently peppered with such groupings. The tricolon, to give it its technical name, can make even nonsense sound compelling, as I discussed in the section on cadence.
I mentioned Douglas Alexander’s ‘I am Scottish by birth, by choice and by aspiration.’ What was important about that phrase was not what it said, but the impression it gave. Tri-colons work on the ear, not on the brain. They are a cadence effect. A good one will also cohere in its meaning – the three things will reinforce rather than contradict each other – but the extra work a tricolon is doing is all on the reader’s inner ear.
That’s a recommendation but also a warning. As with any special effect, overdoing tricolons will diminish the force of any single one. But used in a position to give them maximum effect – on the important bits: the end of a paragraph or a chapter – they are an extraordinarily valuable resource.
Repeating words or phrases has a strong effect on what a reader takes away from a given piece of language. This is especially marked, and especially necessary, in the spoken language – where readers can’t flick back – but it has a place in written prose, too. Anaphora – or repeating words or phrases at the beginnings of sentences – is the commonest sort. It can give a sense of sentences yoked together and pulling in the same direction. Epistrophe (repeating something at the end of successive sentences) can also give an elegant coherence to a passage of work, often near its conclusion.
But these are set-piece figures. More informally, repetition allows you to control emphasis. ‘We have a problem; a problem that no single one of us can solve; but a problem easily overcome if we work together.’ That embeds ‘problem’ that bit more firmly in the reader’s mind – and the beat pause in the semicolon allows the first use to hang in the air for emphasis … before flowing smoothly on as if between the problem and its solution there’s nothing more troubling than a couple of deftly negotiated semicolons.
Most if not all of the pieces of writing we’ll undertake ask and/or answer a question. It might be a simple question, such as ‘How come we ran out of avocado toast during the breakfast service?’, or it might be a complicated one, such as ‘Does existence precede essence?’
Often that question, though, is left ill-defined or implicit. And if it’s fuzzy in the head of the author, there may be trouble ahead. If you’re able to articulate the questions you’re answering to your audience, you can be confident that you have them clear in your own head. And if you’re able to articulate them to your audience, why wouldn’t you do so?
The so-called rhetorical question, asked in no expectation of an answer, is called erotema. In practical communication you won’t see it that often. (Why would you?) But its cousin hypophora – which is where you ask yourself a question aloud and then answer it – is very useful indeed. Still, in a sense, all questions in prose are rhetorical. The audience is not there with you to jump in with an answer.
In day-to-day communication the question works in three ways.
First, it’s a framing device for an argument. It makes explicit to your audience what the passage of writing that comes afterwards is trying to address. It can also be a way of breaking up a larger argument into smaller units and giving clarity to what those units are.
Why should the board consider my funding application for a new outreach centre? For two reasons: A and B. Does A contradict B? Well, let me get onto that …
Second, it’s an attention-getter. Most sentences are indicative. Asking a direct question – switching to the interrogative mood – registers sharply on the reader’s concentration. It marks a break, and a rolling-up of sleeves. The reader at once knows, or feels he or she knows, where he or she is.
Third, it makes a connection with the audience. It more or less expressly says: I’m seeing things from your point of view. It anticipates – and, to an extent, shapes – the issue of what the audience wants from you. It makes a monologue feel like a conversation.
When I’m writing a book review, for instance, I know that among the questions I’m hoping to answer are: What is this book trying to do, and why? How far does it succeed in doing it, and how? And (since I’m not reviewing for academic or scientific journals): does it do so in a way that gives pleasure and that makes it worth its cover-price to a general reader?
Questions will make it not only clear to your audience, but clear to you, what you’re setting out to achieve.
Enumeratio is the fancy name for making a numbered list. It’s something writers and speakers have been doing since the dawn of time. Political pledges, deadly sins, billy goats gruff, horsemen of the apocalypse, lords-a-leaping and commandments have all had the treatment. It remains a very effective way of organising important points to make them both authoritative and – in particular – memorable.
As a written device, it descends from the trick in spoken oratory of numbering off points on your fingers. You could think of it as a more explicit and formal extension of the tricolon. It makes the core of an argument, or a section of an argument, memorable because it effectively highlights the key points. It also implies a fixed number of them – which has the effect of making an argument seem complete. It implies a certain command, and a certain analytical rigour, in the speaker. That’s why you look such a booby when you either promise four points and can only remember three; or promise three and go on limply to add a fourth as an afterthought.
This was how the former US presidential candidate Rick Perry came so painfully unstuck in a 2011 TV debate. As part of his election platform, he had pledged to abolish three federal agencies. ‘It’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone,’ he said in a tone of can-do determination, ‘commerce, education, and the uh … what’s the third one, there?’ He looked awkward. ‘Let’s see … I can’t. The third one.’ Later: ‘Oops.’ Well worth seeking out the clip on YouTube. If you’re telling the audience there are three vital points, and you can’t remember one of them, they’ll be unimpressed.*
Happily, it’s not so easy to ‘forget’ one or more of your points if you’re writing them down – at least not so spectacularly. But you’d be surprised: it does happen on the page, and it will make the attentive reader wince. Instantly, you out yourself as someone who can’t count, won’t bother to proofread, and/or doesn’t really have a grasp on his own argument.
Enumeratio can work as signposting in a paragraphed essay structure. ‘I will identify three key areas of contention in the Israel/Palestine debate and address them in turn,’ you might write in your Introduction: ‘The status of the Temple Mount, the legitimacy of settlements in the West Bank, and the “right of return”.’ Then you would spend a paragraph or a cluster of them on each one. You might begin these subsequent sections: ‘First …’, ‘second …’, ‘third …’ Instantly, your reader has a map of your argument to follow.
In business and official documents it can also be very effective in combination with a typographical scheme. There’s a good reason that Microsoft Word has a button in the toolbar that will do it for you automatically. A bullet-pointed or numbered list – whether in a tint panel, a break-out box or indented as a block of text – will break up the flow, draw the eye and give the reader pause. It will say to the reader skimming quickly: here’s the important bit. The ‘air’ – or white space – around it frames it and gives the reader, figuratively, breathing space.
Enumeratio doesn’t just help readers navigate a text. It also has an ethos effect. Enumeratio, as I say, makes an argument seem brisk and targeted and ruthlessly thought through. For this reason it has an almost limitless usefulness in business and official communications. If you’re aiming at a more yielding and conversational tone of voice, though, use it with caution. In the first flushes of romance it might find a whimsical use. ‘How do I love thee?’ asked Elizabeth Barrett Browning. ‘Let me count the ways …’ But a letter dumping your boyfriend won’t seem sympathetic if it contains a numbered list of his shortcomings auto-formatted by Microsoft.
The other point to be made about this technique is that if you’re using it for signposting and memory you can’t make a list too long. ‘There are five key points’ is, as it were, a selling proposition – there’s every expectation that the reader will retain those five in memory. Here I refer you back to the rule of the ‘magic number seven’, that guideline for the working memory.
If you set out ten key points you’re pushing it: they might work as a thumb-in-page reference, but they’re unlikely to sit in the reader’s head unless he or she is specifically enjoined to remember them. Rather, they’ll remember the fact of there being ten points rather than the points themselves. Eleven looks inelegant. Many more than that starts to look rambling and disorganised: it will tend to undermine rather than reinforce that impression of clarity and intellectual discipline. Can all of 17 key points be equally important? Won’t some contradict others? Why 17 and not 18, or 19, or 129? We respond well to round numbers, arbitrary though that impression of roundness might be.*
The success of the ‘listicle’ in the social media age taps into the attractions of enumeratio – but there’s a twist that bears brief investigation. Cheap round-number magazine formats (Rolling Stone’s ‘100 Greatest Guitarists’) gave way to cheap round-number television formats (Channel 4’s ‘The 50 Greatest Comedy Characters’), which in turn gave way to something odder. The viral media site BuzzFeed, and its many copycats, took to producing listicles which positively shun round numbers† – and whose organising principle is gleefully trivial.
In 2014, for instance, BuzzFeed published what may represent the pinnacle of the form: ‘44 Medieval Beasts That Cannot Even Handle It Right Now’. It was a collection of illustrations of fantastical beasts from medieval illuminated manuscripts, with captions. So at number four, for example, you got some medieval monk’s rendering of a reptile with what looks to the modern eye like a comically pained expression: ‘This crocodile just wants it all to STOP.’ Very funny it was too. And it had more than three quarters of a million pageviews at the time of writing.
What about working memory? What about the magic number seven? The comic effect of the quirky-numbered listicle, I think, relates exactly to the way that we usually use enumeratio to suggest something orderly, and that we usually use it to signpost importance. The fact that it’s so specific – 44 pained-looking monsters, not 43 or 45 – in the context of such arbitrary subject matter is the joke: it plays off our usual expectations. And yet BuzzFeed has its cake and eats it: the specificity of the number does its usual work of implying something thought-about or at least curated: it promises a limit. ‘Some Medieval Beasts That Cannot Even Handle It Right Now’ isn’t nearly so clickable. Here is enumeratio in a playful postmodern incarnation.
* Practically every TED talk these days begins with some version of Jobs’s formula. ‘Let me tell you a story …’ In How To Talk Like TED (2014) Carmine Gallo estimates that the civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who won the longest standing ovation in TED’s history, spent 65 per cent of his talk telling stories.
* Actually, this saying bears closer scrutiny. In the strict sense, the plural of anecdote actually is data. A medical trial, essentially, aggregates tens of thousands of anecdotes about the health of individuals into (hopefully) a predictively accurate dataset. Which is, oddly, what the author of the phrase originally said. The political scientist Ray Wolfinger wrote ‘the plural of anecdote is data’, and has been misquoted by smart-arses ever since. The singular of anecdote, however, is certainly not data.
* Though, rhythmically, the feminine ending – stressed then unstressed – of ‘diffusive’ opens that tightly knotted little phrase up.
* Limerick form can be pretty loose – but the Middlemarch rhythm is one of the commonest, cf. ‘That SIlly young MAN from BrazIL …’ If the silly young man is from Devizes, you’ll find an extra unstressed syllable bolted onto the end.
* That’s technically called a molossus.
† Losing his rag completely is one of the things that Giles is famous for.
‡ The comma splice in this sentence – see ‘Perils and Pitfalls’ – may be passed over on the grounds that it appears in informal email communication – and that the author is so crazy with anger he’s not thinking hard about his grammar.
* And as for never having ended on an unstressed syllable, well – the first restaurant review that came up when I searched his byline on The Times’s website just now ended with this sentence: ‘Although I dare say there is a pompous restaurant critic somewhere in central China at this very moment, chewing on a pissy mouthful of the stuff and picking up his pen to write the Chinese for “correct” in his little notebook.’ If you can pronounce ‘notebook’ with the stress on the second syllable rather than the first, I doff my cap to you.
* Actually, the last lines of Eliot’s novels are about half and half – stressed and unstressed. But she did have a belting way with a payoff.
* See ‘Using the Figures’, below.
† If not quite a ‘rule’, it’s at least a strong guideline for successful rhythm that you should put the shortest term in any list first, and the longest last. This is the principle of climax underscoring the rising tricolon. ‘I am Scottish by aspiration, birth and choice’ has nothing of the drum-roll about it. ‘I will be fishing for cod, blue-fin tuna, the inedible but mighty basking shark, and the many-tentacled deep-sea octopus’ just, somehow, tends to sound better than ‘I will be fishing for the many-tentacled deep-sea octopus, blue-fin tuna, the inedible but mighty basking shark, and cod.’
* This is before we had literary criticism in an academic sense, still less linguistics or anything much in the way of formal discussion of grammar.
* The opposite problem is exploited for comic effect in Monty Python’s ‘Spanish Inquisition’ sketch. ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’ is Cardinal Ximénez’s opener as he bursts into the room. ‘Our chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and fear … fear and surprise. Our two weapons are fear and surprise … and ruthless efficiency.’ He frowns. ‘Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency … and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Our four … no … amongst our weapons … amongst our weaponry … are such elements as fear, surprise … I’ll come in again.’
* That we count in base 10 is a cultural accident, presumably not unrelated to how many fingers we have.
† Indeed, by not using round numbers they give the implicit impression that none of the entries is filler.