Essentially style resembles good manners. It comes of endeavouring to understand others, of thinking for them rather than yourself—or thinking, that is, with the heart as well as the head.
—Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
Most inexperienced writers believe that what makes a person a good writer is her ability to come up with words. As we’ve seen, though, skilled writers know how to choose words and they know how to arrange those words effectively in sentences. Skilled writers, then, have a command of syntactic structures. This doesn’t mean they necessarily know the grammatical names for every structure they use; it does mean that they have those structures so completely embedded in their word mind, in their writer's ear, that they can make effective choices every time they write or revise a sentence. If you want to raise the quality of your writing, to make it more powerful, then I urge you, once again, to practice, practice, practice the syntactic structures you learned in the last section, until you can use them without thinking about them.
If you have practiced faithfully, by now you have learned these things: the elements of syntax (parts of speech, phrases, clauses), how to make kernel sentences, how to construct more complex sentences, and how to imitate sentence structures in the work of professional writers. In case you need it, you’ll find in the sidebar a quick review of syntactic constructions.
When we compose sentences, we must use nouns and verbs, and we usually use adjectives and adverbs as well. All of these content parts of speech may be single words, or they may be phrases. Nouns, adjectives, and adverbs can often be clauses. (Verbs cannot.)
Nouns can play the following roles (among others)1… the following roles (among others). Nouns can also modify other nouns and be used in a noun series. For more information on these uses of nouns, consult your grammar book. in a sentence:
1. Noun as subject of a sentence or a clause:
Jane spoke loudly.
Because Bob was late, we missed the plane.
2. Noun as direct object of a verb:
Bob patted the dog.
3. Noun as subject complement of a be verb or linking verb:
Joe is my friend.
4. Noun as indirect object:
We gave Amy all the apples.
5. Noun as object complement:
The club made Susan president.
6. Noun as object of a preposition:
He drove to the store.
7. Noun as object of a verbal:
Bowing their heads, the congregation prayed.
To catch the thief, they set a trap.
8. Noun as adjective:
They sat on the lawn in the fading summer light.
9. Noun as adverb:
Steve went home.
10. Noun as appositive:
John, my friend, spoke up for me.
11. Noun as nominative absolute:
Sally, her lips pressed together, shook her head.
Practice using nouns in the ways outlined above. Start with single nouns, then experiment with noun phrases and noun clauses.
Verbs, as we’ve learned, can take two roles in sentences: They can be the main verb of a sentence or a clause (finite verbs) or they can be verbals (nonfinite verbs).
Practice using finite and nonfinite verbs. Review Chapter 8 if you can’t quite remember how verbals work.
Adjectives, as you know, modify nouns. They can also follow, as subject complement, a be verb or a linking verb. Adverbs modify verbs, and sometimes they modify nouns or adjectives. Adjectives and adverbs can be single words, phrases, or clauses; they can be used as bound modifiers or free modifiers.
Practice using single words, phrases, and clauses as adjectives and adverbs. Practice using these constructions as bound modifiers and as free modifiers.
In doing these practices, try putting the syntactic constructions into kernels, then into compound sentences. If you use adjective and adverb clauses, you'll find yourself writing complex sentences—or even compound-complex sentences! (If you need to review the terminology for kinds of sentences, see Chapter 13.)
If you take the time to explore all the syntactic constructions in English, and the ways in which they can be used, you'll undoubtedly be amazed at how many options we have for composing sentences. Add to these the immense word hoard of the English language, and it's clear that the possibilities for writing sentences are infinite. Perhaps you find all those options exhilarating, or perhaps they make you feel overwhelmed. Either way, it's important to remember that while all those options exist, we don't have to make use of every single one of them. As we write and revise, we make choices about which ones to use. Exploring the options through practice makes our word mind stronger and more flexible, less stuck in the same old ruts of sentence construction. At the same time, when we work on a piece of writing others will read, our choices are constrained by our need to communicate. We can't throw in a verbal here, or an appositive there, just because we feel like it. We need to use all the options of diction and syntax to make ourselves clear to readers and to keep their attention.
A couple of thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle recorded some of the earliest instructions in writing. “The most important goal of writing,” he said, “is to be clear without being boring.” His instructions still hold true today. Writing that is confused, unnecessarily complex, or just plain hard to understand will not hold the attention of readers. Unless they are forced into it, most people will not continue reading sentences that do not convey clear meaning. That doesn’t mean that we must write only simple thoughts; it means that, no matter how complex our thoughts are, we must present them in such a way that readers can understand what we are saying. So, as we write and rewrite, we always need to be asking ourselves, What am I trying to say here? and Will somebody who isn’t me understand what I am saying?
Choosing just the right word or phrase instead of settling for the almost-right synonym is one way we create clear, readable writing. Another way is to make effective use of the language of the imagination. Perhaps our most important tool for creating clarity, though, is the way we use syntax.
As you’ve learned in previous chapters, readers process our sentences one bit at a time, adding each word or phrase to the ones that precede it. A command of syntax enables us to order our words so they say something to readers; it ensures that our writing makes sense to them. The work of composition, then, is largely the work of ordering our material into sentences, for the order in which words, images, and ideas come to us as we write is not necessarily the order in which we want to present them to our readers.
As anyone who has done the practice of freewriting knows, our minds do not naturally work in a linear fashion. Rather, they give us thoughts, ideas, and words in what feel like free-associative clusters. So when we try to get those ideas, thoughts, and words down on paper as they have occurred to us, we may not be concerned with the order in which we record them. In fact, it may not even feel like these thoughts have an order; they may feel more like networks of connection. If we wanted to make a representation of these networks of thought, as they happen in our minds, we could probably do that visually, because a visual representation allows us to work in space and therefore to show a picture of more than one thing at the same time.
But writing, like speech, does not happen in space; it happens in time. And the time we must concern ourselves with—not necessarily as we try to get down on paper our first, fleeting thoughts or visions, but most definitely at some point before we finish a piece—is the experience, in time, that our readers will have as they process our sentences. Because of the nature of the English language, readers will have to take in what we tell them, one word-group at a time, one sentence at a time, one paragraph at a time. As they read, they will add each “bit” of information to the bits that have come earlier. Knowledge of syntax provides us with established linguistic structures that enable us to order our thoughts and words so that readers can add them together and make sense of them. Much of the revision that a skilled writer does involves tinkering with the order of elements in her sentences so that readers can process them with ease and extract from them the meaning she intends.
One of the best ways to ensure that we have successfully ordered our sentences for the minds of readers is to read our work out loud. When we read aloud, we come closer to the experience a reader will have of our words. When we read our words silently, it’s very easy to “read into” them what we mean to say: We have our intended meaning in mind, and we project that into the words on that page. But the reader, as I always tell my students, is not inside the head of the writer. When we get our words out of our own heads and into the air, we can really hear them; and then it’s much easier to understand them as our readers will.
Take some passages from your own writing, or some of your practice sentences, and read them out loud slowly, pretending that you are someone who has never seen them before. Try to listen to them, receive them, as a reader, rather than as a writer. Take in these words and sentences as a reader would, one “bit” at a time. Notice whether your imaginary reader will be confused by anything in your writing. Is your meaning clear? Mark all the places where clarity is lacking.
Now, using what you have learned from earlier sections in this book, as well as from the review above of syntactic structures, revise your marked passages for clarity. Read them aloud again. How do they sound now, to your imagined reader? If they’re still not clear, revise again.
Clear communication is a kind of successful magic. When we write with clarity, we transfer meaning from our minds into the minds of other people—people we don’t know and will probably never meet. But our words and sentences make another kind of magic, too, which gives them even more power: They make things happen; they do things to people. The words we choose have different kinds of power; so do our sentences.
What are some of the things sentences can do? You’ll remember that they can make a statement, ask a question, make a command, or make an exclamation.
When we consider declarative sentences (which make statements) more closely, we find that this kind of sentence can also do many different things. For instance:
It can narrate; that is, tell what happened, convey an action or an event: Joe walked slowly down the street, thinking hard.
It can describe; make a picture: The street was lined with apple trees, all covered with white blossoms and giving off a sweet smell.
It can give someone’s reactions to happenings or pictures: But Joe didn’t notice.
It can give someone’s thoughts: “If only I hadn’t said that,” Joe thought.
OR: Joe wished he had said nothing.
It can give someone’s spoken words: “What a fool I am!” he said.
It can give someone’s feelings: Joe felt sad.
OR: As Joe spoke, a tear ran down his face.
It can state a fact or report a piece of information: Joe was fifteen years old; he hadn’t cried since he was a kid.
It can convey an idea or explain something: His father had always told him that men don’t cry.
It can state an opinion or make a comment: But sometimes what our fathers tell us turns out not to be true.
Try writing some declarative sentences, using any of the techniques you have learned so far, and think about each sentence’s purpose, what you want each sentence to do. Experiment with sentences that do different things.
Now take a look at a passage or two by one of your favorite writers. See if you can figure out what each sentence is doing, and jot that down. For instance, you might write: sentence 1—gives a piece of information; sentence 2—gives a picture; and so on. Then imitate the passage by writing sentences that imitate, in order, what each sentence in your chosen passage is doing.
Pick a subject and write some sentences on it, thinking not only about what you want to say, but also about what you want each sentence to do. Keep in mind your options for syntactic structures.
When we write and revise sentences, there’s another thing we can pay attention to: sentence movement. Thinking about what our sentences are doing (as in the previous exercises) is one way to enliven our sentences with movement.
Even more important to sentence movement is the actual structure of our sentences. Forward movement is embedded in the basic structure of the English sentence: the S-V, or S-V-C (subject-verb-complement or object) kernel pattern. In this pattern, as we saw in earlier lessons, the subject of the sentence—the “actor”—usually comes first, then comes the predicate—the “action.” With the use of this pattern, every sentence is a story. And so sentences written according to this basic pattern, either as kernels or with the careful use of modifiers, move forward. This forward movement helps to sustain our readers’ attention.
As we have seen, we can also hold our readers’ attention through the way we place our modifiers, whether they are single words, phrases, or clauses. We can choose when to pass on information in a sentence; our choices can create flow, suspense, drama, surprise, and other effects. One of our main tools for creating these effects is free modifiers.
Remember that we have three possibilities for placing free modifiers: before the subject, after the main verb, between the subject and the main verb. Grammarians sometimes call these three kinds of sentences, respectively: left-branching sentences, right-branching sentences (also known as cumulative sentences), and mid-branching sentences. Let’s take a look at these from the point of view of sentence movement, beginning with the most straightforward: right-branching (cumulative) sentences.
Once we have the basic pattern of English sentences in our minds, it becomes quite easy to write sentences that begin with the subject, continue with the verb … and then keep going. Professional writers make use of this kind of sentence all the time:
My great-uncle Silas used to live in a small stone reed-thatched cottage on the edge of a pine-wood, where nightingales sang passionately in great numbers through early summer nights and on into the mornings and often still in the afternoons.
—H.E. Bates, “The Lily”
One of the great advantages of the right-branching sentence is that it lets you move your reader forward into the next sentence:
The guard, eight little Dyak soldiers, stood to attention as [Mr. Warburton] passed. He noted with satisfaction that their bearing was martial, their uniforms neat and clean, and their guns shining. They were a credit to him.
—W. Somerset Maugham, “The Outstation”
To create a left-branching sentence, we place free modifiers (or flexible adverbials) before the subject of a kernel. This structure creates movement in a different way: It helps us set a scene or delay the action of the sentence.
A tiny brown, glittering creature, the fly soared up to the ceiling, sped like a bullet past the child’s ears, collided with the walls, and rebounded in noisy spirals.
—J. Kessel, “The Doll”
At police headquarters, at the National Gallery, at Oslo’s newspaper and television and radio stations, phones rang day and night.
—Edward Dolnick, The Rescue Artist
Whenever a situation gets so ticklish that he wishes he were somewhere else, he can walk over to the globe and pick spots to go to.
—Rex Stout, The Doorbell Rang
The mid-branching sentence inserts useful information into the middle of a sentence while keeping the movement of the sentence going:
The flames—and theirs was a strange music—roared loud in the wintry air—red, greenish, copper and gold—licking and leaping their way from strand to strand up and up …
—Walter de la Mare, Dick and the Beanstalk
But Charlie, the bank-clerk on twenty-five shillings a week, who had never been out of sight of a made road, knew it all.
—Rudyard Kipling, “The Finest Story in the World”
It’s also possible to insert additional material between the two clauses of a compound sentence:
One [television monitor] screen suddenly flickered with life. The black-and-white picture was shadowy—the sun would not rise for another ninety minutes—but the essentials were clear enough.
—Edward Dolnick, The Rescue Artist
And finally, skilled writers often make use of two or three of these options in a single sentence:
Though old when I made his acquaintance, he was still a powerful horse of a man, always dressed in well-pressed Irish tweeds, heavy countryman’s boots and a fawn, flat-topped bowler-hat set squat above a big, red, square face, heavy handlebar mustaches and pale-blue, staring eyes of which one always saw the complete circle of the iris, challenging, concentrated, slightly mad.
—Sean O’Faolain, “A Touch of Autumn in the Air”
Charmed by the sober beauty of the house, fascinated by the seclusion of its setting, your refined taste tickled by the good manners of the noticeboard, you will decide that here at last is the country hotel of your dreams, where good cheer and comfort await the truly discriminating traveller.
—Cyril Hare, Suicide Excepted
If it was inevitable that Rose Birkett should marry a naval man, it was equally inevitable that the day of her wedding should be the most perfect day of unclouded sun tempered by a breeze not powerful enough to disarrange her hair or her veil.
—Angela Thirkell, Cheerfulness Breaks In
Rare, exotic, strangely lovely, the red lily had blossomed there, untouched, for as long as I could remember.
—H.E. Bates, “The Lily”
Study the examples above—or choose others you prefer—for how each writer constructs his sentence to create—or delay—forward movement. Then imitate the structure of the sentence. Draw on your knowledge of syntactic sentences to experiment with combining single words acting in various roles and with different kinds of phrases and clauses.
When we talk about the movement of sentences, we leave the realm of single sentences and enter that of sentence-groups—otherwise known as paragraphs. How do we arrange our sentences into paragraphs? How do we keep the movement of our thoughts and images going from one sentence to the next?
Sometimes the technique of freewriting, or focused freewriting, will enable us to write sentences that flow naturally one into the next. But often this approach doesn’t work. Here’s something else to try: Write a fairly simple sentence. Then identify the elements of the sentence, as follows:
Sentence: The woman walked to the store.
Elements: the woman / walked / to the store
Now choose one element and develop it to create a paragraph, like this:
1. The woman walked to the store. She was tall, maybe five-eight, and her body had the taut look that comes with long hours at the gym. Her blonde hair gleamed in the sun, and her painted nails flickered like tiny red lights.
2. The woman walked to the store. She moved slowly and tentatively, as if she were taking each step for the first time. Her feet, in battered sneakers, appeared to be not quite touching the pavement, and she kept glancing around as she walked as if she were looking for something to hold on to.
3. The woman walked to the store. Once it had been a real general store, where you could find anything you needed. Nails, bandages, cola, cigarette papers, a quart of milk, a half-dozen eggs—they had it all. The owner, Mr. Johnson, would even give you credit, if you went there often enough. But then one day Mr. Johnson died, and his relatives sold the place to some yuppies from the city who turned it into one of those upscale bakeries where they don’t even sell doughnuts. She didn’t like the way the store was now, but she went there anyway, because they would let her have day-old bread at half-price.
Write a simple sentence as in the example above. Take one element and develop it through several sentences to create a paragraph. Then take a different element and develop that one. What do you notice in doing this?
Paragraphs, like sentences, are a tool we use to grab and keep our readers’ attention and to make things happen inside them. Paragraphs, like sentences, begin and end with “pauses.” In the case of sentences, those pauses are indicated by periods; with paragraphs, we use white space on the page. That white space, like punctuation, gives readers time to take a mental breath, to assimilate what they have just taken in, and to ready themselves for what is to come. So how we construct our paragraphs depends in large part on how we want to use them to create a certain kind of experience for our readers.
Just as readers process sentences by adding one word-group to the one they just read, so they process paragraphs by adding sentences together. When we write and revise, we may want to consider what will happen inside our readers as they finish one sentence in a paragraph and then move into the next one. Is this what we want to have happen at this particular moment?
When we think about how to move our sentences forward, one to the next, one of the things we can consider is how to create continuity or “flow”—a sense of one thing connecting naturally to what preceded it and what follows.
As we learned earlier, linguists tell us that the typical English sentence has a characteristic movement, from known to unknown. Keeping that concept in mind can help us create continuity in our writing. One of the most useful techniques for creating continuity is to repeat a word or phrase from one sentence in the next (or in a nearby sentence). Sometimes writers repeat the subject (or use a pronoun that refers to it):
Dusko Popov, the Serbian playboy, was not as feckless and apolitical as he seemed. The invitation from his old friend Johnny Jebsen to work for German intelligence was an attractive one.
—Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies
Sometimes a writer will repeat a word other than the subject (or use a pronoun that refers to it):
“This is what you take to Paris,” the gray-uniformed man said. He had opened his toolbox and drawn out an envelope. It was a medium-sized opaque envelope, unaddressed, sealed, not much bulkier than if it contained a three-page airmail letter. He threw it across the desk.
—Helen MacInnes, The Venetian Affair
Other techniques for creating continuity include opening a sentence with an adverbial phrase or clause (An hour later … or When we had finished dinner …) or a coordinating conjunction. Professionals also use appositives, nominative absolutes, and other syntactic techniques to bring related material close together.
Write a few sentences, experimenting with using one or more of the techniques explained above to create flow.
Read through the following excerpt (from a recent nonfiction book), and notice your reactions. Then read through it again, seeing if you can discover how the writer keeps the narrative continuous, while moving us around.
… A motion detector triggered a second alarm. This time the guard, 24-year-old Geir Berntsen, decided that something was wrong. Panicky and befuddled, he thrashed about trying to sort out what to do. Check things out himself? Call the police? Berntsen still had not noticed the crucial television monitor, which now displayed a ladder standing unattended against the museum’s front wall. Nor had he realized that the alarm had come from room 10, where The Scream hung.
Berntsen phoned his supervisor, who was at home in bed and half-asleep, and blurted out his incoherent story … At almost precisely the same moment, a police car making a routine patrol through Oslo’s empty streets happened to draw near the National Gallery. A glance told the tale: a dark night, a ladder, a shattered window.
The police car skidded to a stop …
—Edward Dolnick, The Rescue Artist
Take a look at a passage from a writer you like and see if you can figure out what she did to create continuity. Then imitate that technique. You might also like to try revising some of your own writing to increase your reader’s sense of continuity.
When we write to create continuity, we are, in a sense, encouraging the reader to proceed in a particular direction, step-by-step. But sometimes what we want is not continuity, but temporary discontinuity: We want our readers to take mental leaps.
There are almost always places in our writing where we must invite our readers to take these leaps: when we take a new view of a subject, change a scene, move back or forward in time, etc. When we change directions in these (and other) ways, we need to remember to bring our readers along with us. Skilled writers know how to make such leaps easy for their readers by carefully ordering images, ideas, and syntactic elements, by using transitions, by making a new paragraph at just the right point, or by a skilled use of free modifiers. They also use some of the same techniques that create flow: repetition of a word or phrase, or beginning a sentence with an adverbial.
In the predawn gloom of a Norwegian winter morning, two men in a stolen car pulled to a halt in front of the National Gallery, Norway’s preeminent art museum. They left the engine running and raced across the snow. Behind the bushes along the museum’s front wall they found the ladder they had stashed away earlier that night. Silently, they leaned the ladder against the wall.
A guard inside the museum, his rounds finished, basked in the warmth of the basement security room …
—Edward Dolnick, The Rescue Artist
[Stephen’s] first excited reaction to London—its shops, its restaurants, its well-dressed attractive women—had faded. He saw it now as a glittering rhinestone set in a dingy setting.
Supposing he were back in South Africa now … He felt a quick pang of homesickness. Sunshine—blue skies—gardens of flowers—cool blue flowers—hedges of plumbago—blue convolvulus clinging to every little shanty.
And here—dirt, grime and endless incessant crowds—moving, hurrying, jostling…
—Agatha Christie, A Holiday for Murder
Use the above examples as a model, or find some examples of your own. Notice how the writer enables our minds to take a leap; notice where the paragraph breaks come. And notice, as well, what technique(s) the writer uses to keep us oriented as we leap. Imitate the examples in a way that feels useful to you.
Now take a passage of your own writing that contains at least one leap, and see if you need to rewrite it to ease your reader’s path. (Leaps demand more of a reader than moving step-by-step.) You can also try this exercise by seeing if there’s a way to tighten a sprawling passage in your work by omitting some steps and taking a “leap” instead.
Paragraphs, as you no doubt learned in school, are tools for organizing sentences. How you do that depends on the kind of writing you are doing: A formal essay requires formal, logical organization; paragraphs in fiction require organization of images and narrative events. As you study and imitate paragraphs from your chosen models, remember to use your writer’s ear to listen to where the paragraph breaks go. Experiment with breaking a paragraph in different ways, read your work out loud, listen for the version that works best, that has the effect you want.
Stephen King has called paragraphs the “beat” of a story. Listening for that beat is one way into the realm of rhythm in writing—the subject of the next chapter.
What stands out for you in this lesson? Are there any practices you want to revisit?
1… the following roles (among others). Nouns can also modify other nouns and be used in a noun series. For more information on these uses of nouns, consult your grammar book.