In Praise of the Long Complicated Sentence
There’s no evidence that certain words are objectively beautiful or beloved by the majority of people. Many individuals have words that they love, but your favorites and mine are probably different. I’m a fan of click, lizard, oh, alabaster, loon, crinkle, zigzag, fay, vim, fuck, luscious, scissors, cunt, and quagmire. But, for me, beauty in language is less about individual works and more about words in contexts. Depending on the sentence or phrase it’s housed in, almost any word can be beautiful or ugly. The word “see” isn’t special to me on its own, but it becomes magical when Shakespeare has Ophelia say, “O, woe is me / To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!” and the words “it” and “thing,” which are normally humdrum, shine in the slogans “Coke is it!” and “It’s the real thing.”
What are some tips to write better sentences?
https://www.quora.com/profile/Marcus-Geduld Marcus Geduld, Published author, lifelong reader. 4.7k Views I second Auguste Hall’s main point: Speak them aloud. It really doesn’t get any more important than that. I believe if authors did that more we’d be spared a lot of torture. Sentences don’t have to be short. They can be complex, rich, stuffed full of lists, detail, whatever, so long as they are comfortable and flowing when you speak them aloud. I also agree that “Building Great Sentences” is a really useful (and fun) course. http://www.thegreatcourses.com/t… Here are a few more resources: I recommend that you read both “Strunk and White” and “Spunk and Bite,” the second being an antidote to the first. They will give you two polar views of style. You can bounce between them: 1. http://www.amazon.com/The-Elemen… (“The Elements of Style” is often called “Strunk and White,” after its two authors.) 2. http://www.amazon.com/Spunk-Bite… And I also recommend “Artful Sentences” by Virginia Tufte (mother of Edward Tufte, the famous design guru). It’s a encyclopedic look at all sorts of sentences and how writers construct them. http://www.amazon.com/Artful-Sen… In addition, here are some of my own tips:
Read your writing aloud. (Thanks, August.) When I read aloud, I find myself doing a lot of cutting. For instance, after drafting this post, I read it aloud, and when I got to this sentence …
“That allows the reader the chance to contrast the two thoughts.”
… I realized that “the chance to” was just gumming up the sentence, making it more complex than necessary. So I change it to …
“That allows the reader to contrast the two thoughts.”
If I hadn’t read the post aloud, I never would have found that blunder.
Play. Which can mean breaking the rules. That’s fine: just understand what you’re breaking. By “play,” I mean try nouning verbs and verbing nouns, as Shakespeare does:
Henry IV: My gracious uncle –
Edmund of Langley: Tut, tut! Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle. I am no traitor’s uncle…
Or try writing super-short sentences, as in “Worst. Episode. Ever.” In general, beboop between following the rules and tossing them to the wind, thinking of language as your playground.
Write sensually. We only know the world via touch, taste, smell, vision and hearing. So when you include sensual imagery in your writing, it will connect with readers.
I always so a “sensual edit,” by which I mean that I go through my prose and see where I can five-sense it up. If I’ve gone on for two paragraphs without evoking any smells, tastes, touches, sounds or sights, I try to correct that.
This is especially important when writing about abstract ideas. There’s only so much abstraction most people can take. At some point, readers need a concrete example or, at least, a metaphor that explains the abstraction in terms of a real-world (touchable, seeable, etc.) object. “He was frightened as a child locked in a dark closet.”
Verbs are your friends. If you write something like “slowly walking,” which uses an adverb to modify a verb, trying pulling out the thesaurus, looking up “walk,” and seeing if you can find a verb that will allow you to dispense with the adverb: meandering? strolling? loping?
This is not because “adverbs are bad.” It’s because specific verbs are more likely to spark an image in the reader’s brain than vague verbs that you have to modify. (See point #4, above.)
The same is true for nouns and adjectives. Instead of “a small glass,” how about “a shot glass”? Specificity really helps the reader see what you’re seeing. So while you don’t need to remove all modifiers, look at each one and see if there’s a way you can specify-up the noun or verb being modified.
Play with E-prime. E-prime is English without any form of “to be.” So you can’t use “is,” “am,” “are” or “was.” When I write in E-prime, I allow myself to use to-be verbs as tense modifiers – as in “was running” – but never as the main verb, as in “She was lonely.”
Why E-prime? Because it forces you to (a) flex your strong-verb muscles, and (b) it forces you to think in terms of “who is doing what to whom.” I am certainly not suggesting you always write in E-prime, but I forced myself to do it for a year (and I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it, so I couldn’t get away with prose that was noticeably awkward), and my writing greatly improved as a result. It’s all too easy to turn every sentence into an “to be” sentence: “George is the CEO of the company. Yesterday, hewas just V.P. of Marketing, but he got promoted. He is the guy who gives us our tasks. He is the best boss I’ve ever had!”
Contrast that with “The board promoted George to CEO, rewarding him for his two years of service as V.P. of Marketing. We report to him.” Note that, in this rewrite, George didn’t just magically become CEO. A specific entity (the board) made him CEO. The board is the who that did what to whom.
I didn’t rewrite the final sentence – “He is the best boss I’ve ever had” – because E-prime made me realize it’s basically an empty sentence. (I was telling rather than showing!) In what way is he the best boss? What does he do that’s different from other bosses? A great (and sometimes frustrating) thing about E-prime is that it forces you to confront vacuous phrases in your writing. Here’s a possible rewrite: “He gave us all raises, and he always values our input!” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-P…
How do I learn to write long sentences that will not be subject to criticism? Better sentences
https://wordswordswords.quora.com/ Once a year, I read “The Great Gatsby.” Each time, different sentences pop out at me, bonking me in the head, slaying me with their brilliance. If you want to learn how to write, make Fitzgerald’s book your Talmud.
This stopped my heart:
“(I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)”
The best sentences evoke sensations, and this one evokes three: sound, sight and kinesthesia. I hear Daisy murmur, I see people leaning in, and I feel the bend in my own body, as I try to catch Daisy’s words.
With great economy, the sentence informs me she is a habitual murmurer. I know that indirectly, deducing it from the fact that she murmurs so often that people gossip about it. From the sentence, I also learn that Daisy has detractors.
And I learn that Nick, the narrator, is quick to defend her. It’s a fascinating effect, because by defending her, he undermines her. I’d have no way of knowing that people distrust her if he didn’t tell us their skepticism is irrelevant. (Imagine a “friend” saying, “It doesn’t matter what anyones says. I will always think you’re attractive!”) He sounds defensive, which shines a spotlight on the criticism. I’m suddenly sure that Daisy is manipulative. And I’m sure Nick is too smitten to know her true nature. Which has the effect of undermining him as a narrator. He’s proven himself to be biased, not objective.
I also believe Daisy, though deceitful, is charming. Had Fitzgerald told me she was charming, I wouldn’t have been charmed. I’m charmed because Nick thinks she’s charming. I’m charmed because he’s defending her honor. Which makes me think it’s worth defending.
And Fitzgerald hides this world of data inside parentheses. I suddenly know a lot about Daisy, Nick, and their world – almost without knowing how I know it.
The paragraph dedicated to Jay’s smile is an outstanding example of how Scott depicts the enigmatic looking emotion…enigmatically. “He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.” I can never imagine to paint something so beautifully!
Here’s the nut of what I learned. Write shorter sentences. Write declarative sentences.
The easiest thing to parse, from the standpoint of pure understanding, is a simple, declarative sentence. See spot run. Run spot run.
I immediately became the editor for every group project I was on. I would routinely sit down with a colleague’s writing and cut the sentences into thirds. Most bad writing, if it’s exposition, tries to cram too many thoughts into one sentence. I found that I could break most sentences into two or three. Then, I’d make most into declarative sentences. You leave in a few clauses here and there to vary the pace, create a rhythm, and keep interest. So it doesn’t sound like a robot generated them.
before you add the clutter, keep it simple stupid
The most basic skill a writer can have is the ability to describe things simply and clearly, which means either painting a concrete picture or making a clear argument. It also means using easy but exacting words and to-the-point syntax. For example, this sentence … “Worrying about his sick kitten and puzzling over the situation in the Middle East, he hurried—all the while checking his watch—towards the train.” … would be much clearer (though not necessarily better) as … “He hurried towards the train, all the while checking his watch, worrying about his sick kitten, and puzzling over the situation in the Middle East.” The easiest form of sentence to understand is “subject verb.” The more words you cram between those two parts of speech (or before them), the tougher it is for the reader to understand. The reader wants to know who is doing whatto whom. In my sentence, the “who” is “he” and the “what” is “hurried towards the train.” I am not advocating prose in which every sentence (or even any sentence) follows that form. I am saying you should understand how to write that way, why it’s a clear way to write, and, when you deviate from it, why you’re doing so. In the above example, maybe my goal is to highlight the sick kitten and the Middle-East situation, and that’s why I begin with them. Or maybe I’m trying to create tension by delaying getting-to-the-point. That’s fine, as long as I understand what I’m doing. Complex phrasing, challenging words, and baroque sentence structures are all useful tools, but you should know how to use them, when to use them, and how to make do without them. Walk before you can run.
GARY LUTZ
THE SENTENCE IS A LONELY PLACE
A LECTURE DELIVERED BY THE SHORT-STORY WRITER GARY LUTZ TO THE STUDENTS OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY’S WRITING PROGRAM IN NEW YORK ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2008
DISCUSSED: The Forlornities of Life, Overliteral Pronunciation, Books as Props, Books as Reliquaries, The Scrunch and Flump of Consonants, Barry Hannah, Gordon Lish, Abruptions, Narratives of Steep Verbal Topography,Sam Lipsyte, Consummated Language, Christine Schutt, Interior Vowels
I came to language only late and only peculiarly. I grew up in a household where the only books were the telephone book and some coloring books. Magazines, though, were called books, but only one magazine ever came into the house, a now-long-gone photographic general-interest weekly commandingly namedLook. Words in this household were not often brought into play. There were no discussions that I can remember, no occasions when language was called for at length or in bulk. Words seemed to be intruders, blown into the rooms from otherwhere through the speakers of the television set or the radio, and were easily, tinnily, ignorable as something alien, something not germane to the forlornities of life within the house, and readily shut off or shut out. Under our roof, there was more divulgence and expressiveness to be made out in the closing or opening of doors, in footfalls, in coughs and stomach growlings and other bodily ballyhoo, than in statements exchanged in occasional conversation. Words seemed to be a last resort: you had recourse to speech only if everything else failed. From early on, it seemed to me that the forming and the release of words were the least significant of the mouth’s activities—and more by-products of those activities than the reason for them. When words did come hazarding out of a mouth, they did not lastingly change anything about the mouth they were coming out of or the face that hosted the mouth. They often seemed to have been put in there by some force exterior to the person speaking, and they died out in the air. They were not something I could possess or store up. Words certainly weren’t inside me. A word that I remember coming out of my parents’ mouths a lot was imagine—as in “I imagine we’re going to have rain.” I soon succumbed to the notion that to imagine was to claim to know in advance an entirely forgettable outcome. A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same. I thus spent about the first thirteen or fourteen years of my life not having much of anything to do with language. I am told that once in a while I spoke up. I am told that I had a friend at some point, and this friend often corrected my pronunciations, which tended to be overliteral, and deviant in their distribution of stresses. Any word I spoke, often as not, sounded like two words of similar length that had crashed into each other. Word after word emerged from my mouth as a mumbled mongrel. I was often asked to repeat things, and the repeated version came forth as a skeptical variant of the first one and was usually offered at a much lower volume. When a preposition was called for in a statement, I often chose an unfitting one. If a classmate asked me, “When is band practice?” I would be likely to answer, “At fifth period.” I did not have many listeners, and I did not listen to myself. Things I spoke came out sounding instantly disowned. Childhood in my generation, an unpivotal generation, wasn’t necessarily a witnessed phenomenon. Large portions of my day went unobserved by anyone else, even in classrooms. Anybody glimpsing me for an instant might have described me as a kid with his nose stuck in a book, but nobody would have noticed that I wasn’t reading. I had started to gravitate toward books only because a book was a kind of steadying accessory, a prop, something to grip, a simple occupation for my hands. (Much later, I was relieved to learn that librarians refer to the books and other printed matter in their collections as “holdings.”) And at some point I started to enjoy having a book open before me and beholding the comfortingly justified lineups and amassments of words. I liked seeing words on parade on the pages, but I never got in step with them, I never entered into the processions. I doubt that it often even occurred to me to read the books, although I know I knew how. Instead, I liked how anything small (a pretzel crumb, perhaps) that fell into the gutter of the book—that troughlike place where facing pages meet—stayed in there and was preserved. A book was, for me, an acquisitive thing, absorbing, accepting, taking into itself whatever was dropped into it. An opened book even seemed to me an invitation to practice hygiene over it—to peel off the rim of a fingernail, say, and let the thing find its way down onto a page. The book became a repository of the body’s off-trickles, extrusions, biological rubbish and remains; it became a reliquary of sorts. I was thuswise now archiving chance fragments, sometimes choice fragments, of my life. I was putting things into the books instead of withdrawing their offered contents. As usual, I had things backward. Worse, the reading we were doing in school was almost always reading done sleepily aloud, our lessons consisting of listening to the chapters of a textbook, my classmates and I taking our compulsory turns at droning through a double-columned page or two; and I, for one, never paid much mind to what was being read. The words on the page seemed to have little utility other than as mere prompts or often misleading cues for the sluggard sounds we were expected to produce. The words on the page did not seem to have solid enough a presence to exist independently of the sounds. I had no sense that a book read in silence and in private could offer me something. I can’t remember reading anything with much comprehension until eighth grade, when, studying for a science test for once, I decided to try making my way quietly through the chapter from start to finish—it was a chapter about magnets—and found myself forced to form the sounds of the words in my head as I read. Many of the words were unfamiliar to me, but the words fizzed and popped and tinkled and bonged. I was reading so slowly that in many a word I heard the scrunch and flump of the consonants and the peal of the vowels. Granted, I wasn’t retaining much of anything, but almost every word now struck me as a provocative hullabaloo. This was my first real lesson about language—this inkling that a word is a solid, something firm and palpable. It was news to me that a word is matter, that it exists in tactual materiality, that it has a cubic bulk. Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround. But this discovery was of no help to me in English class, because when we had to write, I could never call up any of the brassy and racketing words I had read, and fell back on the thin, flat, default vocabulary of my life at home, words spoken because no others were known or available. Even when I started reading vocabulary-improvement books, I never seemed capable of importing into my sentences any of the vivid specimens from the lists I had now begun to memorize. My writing was dividered from the arrayed opulences in the vocabulary books. Language remained beyond me. My distance from language continued even through college, even through graduate school. The words I loved were in a different part of me, not accessible to the part of me that was required to make statements on paper. It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. I once later tried to define this kind of sentence as “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative.” The writers of such sentences became the writers I read and reread. I favored books that you could open to any page and find in every paragraph sentences that had been worked and reworked until their forms and contours and their organizations of sound had about them an air of having been foreordained—as if this combination of words could not be improved upon and had finished readying itself for infinity. And as I encountered any such sentence, the question I would ask myself in marvelment was: how did this thing come to be what it now is? This was when I started gazing into sentence after sentence and began to discover that there was nothing arbitrary or unwitting or fluky about the shape any sentence had taken and the sound it was releasing into the world. I’ll try to explain what it is that such sentences all seem to have in common and how in fact they might well have been written. * The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language. So many of the sentences we confront in books and magazines look unfinished and provisional, and start to go to pieces as soon as we gawk at and stare into them. They don’t hold up. Their diction is often not just spare and stark but bare and miserly. There is another way to look at this: The sentence is the site of your enterprise with words, the locale where language either comes to a head or does not. The sentence is a situation of words in the most literal sense: words must be situated in relation to others to produce an enduring effect on a reader. As you situate the words, you are of course intent on obeying the ordinances of syntax and grammar, unless any willful violation is your purpose—and you are intent as well on achieving in the arrangements of words as much fidelity as is possible to whatever you believe you have wanted to say or describe. A lot of writers—many of them—unfortunately seem to stop there. They seem content if the resultant sentence is free from obvious faults and is faithful to the lineaments of the thought or feeling or whatnot that was awaiting deathless expression. But some other writers seem to know that it takes more than that for a sentence to cohere and flourish as a work of art. They seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential. These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words. This intimacy is what we mean when we say of a piece of writing that it has a felicity—a fitness, an aptness, a rightness about the phrasing. The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other—the way people and their dogs are said to come to resemble each other, the way children take after their parents, the way pairs and groups of friends evolve their own manner of dress and gesture and speech. A pausing, enraptured reader should be able to look deeply into the sentence and discern among the words all of the traits and characteristics they share. The impression to be given is that the words in the sentence have lived with each other for quite some time, decisive time, and have deepened and grown and matured in each other’s company—and that they cannot live without each other. Here is what I believe seems to happen in such a sentence: Once the words begin to settle into their circumstance in a sentence and decide to make the most of their predicament, they look around and take notice of their neighbors. They seek out affinities, they adapt to each other, they begin to make adjustments in their appearance to try to blend in with each other better and enhance any resemblance. Pretty soon in the writer’s eyes the words in the sentence are all vibrating and destabilizing themselves: no longer solid and immutable, they start to flutter this way and that in playful receptivity, taking into themselves parts of neighboring words, or shedding parts of themselves into the gutter of the page or screen; and in this process of intimate mutation and transformation, the words swap alphabetary vitals and viscera, tiny bits and dabs of their languagey inner and outer natures; the words intermingle and blend and smear and recompose themselves. They begin to take on a similar typographical physique. The phrasing now feels literally all of a piece. The lonely space of the sentence feels colonized. There’s a sumptuousness, a roundedness, a dimensionality to what has emerged. The sentence feels filled in from end to end; there are no vacant segments along its length, no pockets of unperforming or underperforming verbal matter. The words of the sentence have in fact formed a united community. Or, rather, if the words don’t manage to do this all by themselves—because maybe they mostly won’t—you will have to nudge them along in the process. You might come to realize that a single vowel already present in the sentence should be released to run through the consonantal frameworks of certain other prominent words in the sentence, or you might realize that the consonantal infrastructure of one word should be duplicated in another word, but with a different vowel impounded in each structure. You might wonder what would become of a word at one end of a sentence if an affix were thrust upon it from a word at the other end, or what might happen if the syntactical function of a word were shifted from its present part of speech to some other. And as the words reconstitute themselves and metamorphose, your sentence may begin to make a series of departures from what you may have intended to express; the language may start taking on, as they say, a life of its own, a life that contests or trumps the life you had sponsored to live on the page. But it was you who incited these words to shimmer and mutate and reconfigure even further—and what they now are saying may well be much more acute and more crucial than what you had thought you wanted to say. I think this is the only way to explain what happens to my own sentences during those very rare occasions when I am writing the way I want to write, and it seems to account for how sentences by writers I admire have arisen from the alphabet. The aim of the literary artist, I believe, is to initiate the process by which the words in a sentence no longer remain strangers to each other but begin to acknowledge one another’s existence and do more than tolerate each other’s presence in the phrasing: the words have to lean on each other, rub elbows, rub off on each other, feel each other up. Among contemporary writers of fiction, there are few who have regularly achieved what I am calling an intra-sentence intimacy with more exquisiteness and grace than Christine Schutt, especially in her first novel, Florida, and in her second collection of short stories, A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer. Let’s first look inside only a four-word phrase of hers. In her story “The Blood Jet,” Schutt ends a sentence about “life after a certain age” by describing it capsularly as “acutely felt, clearly flat”—two pairs of words in which an adverb precedes an adjective. The adjectives (felt and flat) are both monosyllabic, they are both four letters in length, and they both share the same consonantal casing: they begin with a tentative-sounding, deflating f and end with the abrupt t. In between the two ends of each adjective, Schutt retains the l, though it slides one space backward in the second adjective; and for the interior vowel, she moves downward from a short e to a short a. The predecessive adverbs acutely and clearly share the k-sounding c, and both words are constituted of virtually the same letters, except thatclearly doesn’t retain the t of acutely. The four-word phrase has a resigned and final sound to it; there is more than a little agony in how, with just two little adjustments, felt has been diminished and transmogrified into flat, in how the richness of receptivity summed up in felt has been leveled into the thudding spiritlessness of flat. All of this emotion has been delivered by the most ordinary of words—nothing dredged up from a thesaurus. But what is perhaps most striking about the four-word phrase is the family resemblances between the two pairs of words. There is nothing in the letter-by-letter makeup of the phrase “clearly flat” that wasn’t already physically present in “acutely felt”; the second of the two phrases contains the alphabetic DNA of the first phrase. There isn’t, of course, an exact, anagrammatic correspondence between the two pairs of words; the u of the first pair, after all, hasn’t been carried over into the second pair. (Schutt isn’t stooping to recreational word games here.) But the page-hugging, rather than page-turning, reader—the very reader whom a writer such as Schutt enthralls—cannot help noticing that the second phrase is a selective rearrangement, a selective redisposition, of the first one—a declension, really, as if, within the verbal environment of the story, there were no other direction for the letters in the first pair of words to go. There is nothing random about what has happened here. Schutt’s phrase has achieved the condition that Susan Sontag, in her essay about the prose of poets, called “lexical inevitability.” * Before we turn our eyes and ears to the entirety of a two-clause structure by Christine Schutt, maybe we can agree that almost every word in a sentence can be categorized as either a content word or a functional word. The content words comprise the nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and most verbs: they are carriers of information and suppliers of sensory evidence. The functional words are the prepositions, the conjunctions, the articles, the toof an infinitive, and such—the kinds of words necessary to hold the content words in place on the page, to absorb them into the syntax. The functional words in fact tend to recede into the sentence structure; their visibility and audibility are limited. It’s the content words that impress themselves upon the eye and the ear, so the writer’s attention to sound and shape has to be lavished on the exposed words. They stand out in relief. (Pronouns, of course, do not quite fit tidily into this binary system; pronouns tend to be prominent when they are functioning as subjects or objects and tend to be shrinking when they are in a possessive capacity. And some common verbs—especially those formed from the infinitives to be and to have—tend toward the unnoticeability of operational words.) In Christine Schutt’s two-clause formation “her lips stuck when she licked them to talk,” the second half of a sentence from the short story “Young,” the conspicuous content words are lips, stuck, licked, and talk. These four words are not all that varied consonantically. The reappearing consonants are l and k. Three of the four words have an l: two have the l at the very start of the word (lips and licked), and in the final word (talk), the l has slid into the interior. Three of the four words have a k in common—we go from a terminal k (stuck) to a k that has worked its way backward into the very core (licked) and then again to a terminalk (talk). In the first three words, the l and the k keep their distance from each other: in the first two words, they don’t appear together; inside the third word, licked, they are now within kiss-blowing range of each other over the low-rising i andc that stand between them. In the final word, talk, the l and the kare side-by-side at last—coupled just before the period brings the curtain down. A romance between two letters has been enacted in the sentence: there has been an amorous progression toward union. This kind of flirtation between two letters and their eventual matrimony brighten Christine Schutt’s work not only in the individual sentence but in the paragraph as well. In the four-sentence opening paragraph of the story “The Summer after Barbara Claffey,” in Schutt’s first short-story collection,Nightwork, the characters k and w spend the first three sentences dancing around each other and sometimes tentatively touching, but their intimacy never gets more serious than the conventional embrace they entertain in the familiar participlewalking: I once saw a man hook a walking stick around a woman’s neck. This was at night, from my mother’s window. The man dropped the crooked end behind the woman’s neck and yanked just hard enough to get the woman walking to the car. Letters, of course, are also known as characters, and it’s a courtship of characters that is giving an excitement to these sentences. The w seems warily feminine; the k seems brashly masculine. In the fourth and final sentence of the paragraph, the two characters mate and marry in the unexpected but beautifully apposite participle winking, a union resulting in what is in many ways the most stylistically noteworthy word in the paragraph. Then the w and the k disappear completely and completedly from what is left of the sentence as it plays itself out in a fade-out sequence of prepositional phrases: I saw this and saw rain winking in the yard in the light around our house. Writing is rich to the extent that the drama of the subject matter is supplemented or deepened by the drama of the letters within the words as they inch their way closer to each other or push significantly off. * Gordon Lish—the enormously influential editor, writer, and teacher whom I mentioned earlier—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. The discharge can take many forms and often produces startling outcomes, such as when Christine Schutt, in “The Summer after Barbara Claffey,” is seeking the inevitable adjective to insert into the final slot in the sentence “Here is the house at night, lit up tall and __.” What she winds up doing is literally dragging forward the previous adjective, tall, and using it as the base on which further letters can be erected. The result is the astounding, perfecttallowy—the sort of adjective she never could have arrived at if she had turned a synonymicon upside down in search of words that capture the quality of light. Gordon Lish’s poetics forever changed the way I look at sentences, and so many of the sentences that thrill me are sentences in which consecution and recursion have determined the sound and the shape of the community of words. Take the aphoristic sentence that closes Diane Williams’s story “Scratching the Head,” in her second collection, Some Sexual Success Stories Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear: “An accident isn’t necessarily ever over.” There is so much to remark upon in this six-word, fifteen-syllable declaration. A sibilance hisses throughout accident, isn’t, andnecessarily; and in those three words there are further acoustical continuities—the ih sound moving forward from accident and into isn’t, the en sound moving forward from accident and intoisn’t and into necessarily. In the five-syllable adverb necessarily,the vowel-and-consonant pair ar of the third syllable receives the primary stress, and the ne of the first syllable receives the secondary stress; and the e and the r of those two syllables get filliped forward into ever, and then the dying fall of that adverb is echoed dyingly by over. Ever has morphed into over, of course, with nothing more than the substitution of an o for an e. These tumbly final words tumble out into a long vowel, the only long vowel of the sentence: the woe-laden, bemoaning long o. The final syllable of the sentence is unstressed, and this unaccentedness deprives the sentence of a hard, clear-cut termination, much as the import of the sentence insists that an accident lacks definitive finality. A sentence that I have spent an almost pathological amount of time gaping at since the turn of the century, a sentence that always leaves me agog, is the opening sentence in Sam Lipsyte’s story “I’m Slavering,” in Venus Drive: “Everybody wanted everything to be gleaming again, or maybe they just wanted their evening back.” The paraphrasal content of the statement informs us that high hopes for a return to a previous wealth of life or feeling are inevitably going to have to be scaled back and revised immediately and unconsolingly downward. If you tweak the verb tense from the past to the present, the sentence is even more self-containedly epigrammatic in its encompassing of our shared predicament of disappointments. It’s a richly summationalsentence, not the sort of sentence you might expect to find at the very outset of a story—but there are writers whose mission is sometimes to deliver us from conclusion to conclusion instead of necessarily bogging us down in the facts, the data, the sorry particulars leading to each conclusion. Lipsyte’s sentence is composed of words that, in ordinary hands, are among the most humdrum and pedestrian in our language: in the first half of the sentence alone, the words filling the subject slots in the independent clause and in the infinitive clause are the bland, heavily used indefinite pronouns everybody andeverything. And the entire sentence is in fact completely lacking in specificity and so-called literary or elevated language: there is no load of detail, no verbal knickknackery whatsoever—there are no big-ticket words. The only standout word, the participlegleaming, most likely was called up into the sentence out of bits and pieces of the words preceding it—the ruling vowel of the entire utterance (the long e) and the -ing of everything. Yet this opening flourish of the story not only has both sweep and circumference in its stated meaning, but it has a swing and a lilt to it as well. The first half of the sentence is buoyant, upfloating. The entire sentence has the chiming, soaring, C-chord long e’s ineverybody and be and gleaming and maybe and evening; it has the alliterative ballast of the b’s in everybody and be and maybeand back, and of the g’s in gleaming and again; and the only really closed word in the mix is the final word, the adverb back,which is shut off with harsh consonants at either end, especially the cruelly abrupt, terminal k, which finishes off the sentence and pushes it rudely down to earth. The last vowel in the sentence is the minor-key short a in back—the only appearance in the sentence of the disappointed, dejected ahhh of crap and alas. * Some of the most obvious ways to ensure that the words in a sentence together create a community of sound and shape are too rarely discussed explicitly outside of, say, high-school creative-writing classes. Yet many great writers constantly avail themselves of these little tactics to give their phrasing both dash and finish. The result is often a sentence that looks and sounds fulfilled, permanent. These phrasal maneuvers are concertedly evident in the examples I cited earlier, but they are worth considering individually, because even though we are all well acquainted with every one of them, we too easily forget just how much they can do for us. For starters, make sure that the stressed syllables in a sentence outnumber the unstressed syllables. The fewer unstressed syllables there are, the more sonic impact the sentence will have, as in Don DeLillo’s sentence “He did not direct a remark that was hard and sharp.” You can take this stratagem to breathtaking extremes, as Christine Schutt does in her sentence “None of what kept time once works.” Schutt’s sentence should remind us as well that we need not shy away from composing an occasional sentence entirely of monosyllabic words, as Barry Hannah also does in “I roam in the past for my best mind” and “He’s been long on my list of shits in the world,” and as Ben Marcus does in “They were hot there, and cold there, and some had been born there, and most had died.” Those sentences illustrate another point: unless you have good reason not to do so, end your sentence with the wham and bang of a stressed syllable, as in Dawn Raffel’s sentence “She lived to marry late” and in John Ashbery’s “There was I: a stinking adult.” Such sentences stop on a dime instead of wavering forward for a wishy-washy further syllable or two. At the opposite extreme, give force to your sentences by stationing the subject at the very beginning instead of delaying the subject until an introductory phrase or a dependent clause has first had its dribbling say. This precept of course violates almost every English-composition teacher’s insistence that students vary the openings of their sentences, but you will find the best writers disobeying it as well. Readers have often attempted to account for the extraordinary cumulative power in the work of Joseph Mitchell, who wrote literary journalism for the New Yorker in a deceptively plain and simple style that often achieved incantatory cadences. You can make your way through pages and pages of Mitchell’s work and almost never find him starting a sentence without laying down his subject at the outset. Many fiction writers also skip the preambles, as Dawn Raffel does in her sentence “She was born in December in Baraboo or thereabouts—small, still, blue, a girl, and, by some trick of oxygen, alive.” That Dawn Raffel sentence, with its recurring b’s and l’s, illustrates another form of play available to any writer. Avail yourself of alliteration—as long as it remains ungimmicky, unobtrusive, even subliminal. Such repetition can be soothing and stabilizing, especially in a sentence whose content and emotional gusts are anything but. You can let a single consonant dominate all or most of a sentence—the way Don DeLillo does with h’s in “He was here in the howl of the world,” and as Christine Schutt does with k sounds in “He knew the kind of Kleenex crud a crying girl left behind.” And the reiterated consonants do not have to appear at the beginnings of words: they can also show up at the very ends, as the t’s do in Barry Hannah’s sentence “Ah, well, what you cannot correct you can at least insult,” or they can be confined to the interiors of words, as the l’s are in Elizabeth Hardwick’s sentence “Another day she arrived as wild and florid and thickly brilliant as a bird.” Take advantage of assonance as well. Keeping a single vowel in circulation through most of the conspicuous words will give a sentence another kind of sonic consummation, as Don DeLillo achieves with the five short a’s in “He mastered the steepest matters in half an afternoon,” and as Sam Lipsyte does with three short u’s in “You could touch for a couple of bucks.” (A lesser writer would of course have been satisfied with “For merely two dollars, you could cop a feel.”) Or reserve the assonance for the words in a sentence deserving the greatest stress, as Ben Marcus does in “The ones that never got born were poured into the river.” You can even divide a sentence into two or more acoustical zones and let a single vowel prevail in each zone. Here is a three-zone sentence by Don DeLillo: “There were evening streaks in the white of the eye, a sense of blood sun.” You can make the most of both assonance and alliteration in a single sentence or multi-sentence sequence. In the following two-sentence run, Sam Lipsyte assonates with the long oo sound and alliterates with p’s and k sounds: “Dinner that night was some lewd stew I’d watched Parish concoct, undercooked carrots and pulled pork in ooze. I believe he threw some kiwi in there, too.” Some writers take merged assonance and alliteration beyond slant rhymes or half rhymes (such as lewd, stew, andooze in Lipsyte’s first sentence) and even as far as a careful, unsingsongy kind of internal perfect rhyming, in which the rhyming words end with an identical vowel-and-consonant structure, as Fiona Maazel does in this sentence, which is acoustically unified further by the repeated k sounds: “I could tell she had been crying from the swell of her pores and the spackle crusted at the levees of each eye.” And here are three samplings from the saddeningly neglected writer Elizabeth Smart, all from her short-fiction collection, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals: “This cliff, I thought, this office block, would certainly suit a suicide”; “The long fall is appalling”; and the aphoristically molded, five-word formulation “God likes a good frolic.” In the last of these three sentences, there are all sorts of family resemblances among the words: the identical consonantic shells of God and good (as well as of like and the second syllable infrolic) and the shared vowel of God and frolic. And the way the words have been arrayed gives the sentence its aphoristic permanence. The article a, at the center of the statement, separates two phrases very similar in shape, with the words in the second phrase, good frolic, appearing as enlargements of, and elaborations on, the words in the first pair: God likes. There are still further opportunities for you to put some play into your phrasing. Press one part of speech into service as another, as Don DeLillo does in “She was always maybeing” (an adverb has been recruited for duty as a verb) and as Barry Hannah does in “Westy is colding off like the planet” (an adjective has been enlisted for verbified purpose as well). A variation is to take an intransitive verb (the sort of verb that can’t abide a direct object) and put it in motion as a transitive verb (whose very nature it is to enclasp a direct object). That is what Fiona Maazel is up to with the verb collide, which abandoned all transitive use ages ago, in her sentence “Often, at the close of a recovery meeting, as we make a circle and join hands, I’ll note the odds of these people finding each other in this group; our sundry pasts and principles; the entropy that collides addicts like so many molecules.” Or take some standard, overworked idiomatic phrasing—such as “It turned my stomach”—and transfigure it, as Barry Hannah does in “I saw the hospital in Hawaii. It turned my heart.” Or rescue an ordinary, overtasked verb from its usual drab business and find a fresh, bright, and startling context for it, as Don DeLillo manages with speaks in “You will hit traffic that speaks in quarter inches” and as Barry Hannah does with the almost always lackluster verboccurred in “… a single white wild blossom occurred under the forever stunted fig tree.…” You can also choose to prefer the unexpectable noun, as Diane Williams does with history in “We can come in out from our history to lie down” and as Sam Lipsyte does with squeaks in “Home, we drank a little wine, put on some of that sticky saxophone music we used to keep around to drown out the bitter squeaks in our hearts.” Or you can choose a variant of a common word, a variant that exists officially in unabridged dictionaries but has fallen out of usage—if, that is, you have reason enough for doing so. In Fiona Maazel’s sentence “This was not how I had meant to act, all tough and abradant,” not only does the unfamiliar adjective abradant, with its harsh d and t,sound more abrasive than the milder, everyday abrasive, but its terminal t has been bookended with the initial t of tough, lending symmetry to the adjectives coupled at the sentence’s end. And you can take the frumpiest, the ugliest of the so-called vocabulary words—the Latinate monstrosities that students are compelled to memorize in SAT- and GRE-preparation classes—and urge them into a casual setting, where they finally shine anew. Fiona Maazel pulls this off in her sentence “The floor tiles appeared cubed and motile.” The choice of the unusual sentence-ending adjective, which in other contexts might risk coming across as thesaurusy and pretentious, most likely resulted from the writer’s unwavering alertness to the alphabetics of the noun in the subject slot of her sentence. The upshot of this morphological correspondence between tiles and motile is that the subject’s embrace of its second adjectival complement is much stronger than that which would be achieved by the two words’ merely syntactic functions alone. Finally, you can fool around even with prepositions. Prepositions often attach themselves adverbially to verbs and thus form what are known as phrasal verbs, such ascheck out and open up and see through, but you are not legally bound to use the orthodox preposition with a verb. Don DeLillo breaks from established usage in the sentences “She was always thinking into tomorrow” and “She moved about the town’s sloping streets unnoticed… playing through these thoughts….” Granted, there can be a downside to the kinds of isolative attentions to the sentence I have been advocating. Such a fixation on the individual sentence might threaten the enclosive forces of the larger structure in which the sentences reside. Psychiatrists use the term weak central coherence to pinpoint the difficulty of certain autistic persons to get the big picture, to see the forest instead of the trees. A piece of writing consisting ultimately of an aggregation of loner sentences might well strike a reader as stupefyingly discontinuous, too dense to enchant. But the practices I have been trying to discuss can also result in richly elliptical prose whose individual statements converge excitingly in the participating reader’s mind. These practices account in part for the bold poetry in some of today’s most artistically provocative fiction.
Is the paragraph “Disillusionment with governments is common. It is in most cases healthy and necessary, but succession amid chaos has brought to power the worst of humanity.” solid for an authors note? Why? Profile photo for Marcus Geduld Marcus Geduld , Published author, lifelong reader. Answered Oct 4, 2014 I’m bothered by the lack of agents, by which I mean the lack of “who” in “who is doing what to whom?”
Disillusionment with government is common. Common to whom? To what sorts of people?
It is in most cases healthy and necessary. Healthy in what sense? Necessary for what and to whom? These are agentless abstractions. It’s very hard for readers to visualize them.
but succession amid chaos has brought to power the worst of humanity. Who succeeded whom? Who brought power to whom? Who is the worst of humanity? Worst in what way?
Writers tend to use this sort of indirect, vague, abstract, agentless language when they have something to hide: when they don’t know “who is doing what to whom” and are trying to snow us into thinking they do. “Mistakes were made.”
I am not accusing you of dishonesty. I’m accusing you of sounding dishonest. Or political. Or vague.
In your shoes, I’d work to make the prose more specific. I don’t know your subject-matter, so I’ll use an analogy that is within my area of expertise:
“Disillusionment with the theatre is common. In most cases it’s healthy and necessary, but this constant complaining has brought out the worst in us.”
Here’s a fix for the first sentence: “80% of theatre reviews are negative.” Or “If you stand outside any Broadway theatre, you’ll hear more gripes than praises.” Or “My friends used to rave about Broadway. Now all they do is complain that the sets look cheap, the actors are amateurs, and the writing is pedestrian.”
Of course, my problem might be that I just have a vague sense that disillusionment is common. Maybe I can’t pinpoint it. If so, then that’s the sort of dishonesty I’m talking about. I shouldn’t pass off my hunch as truth.
Well, I won’t say “shouldn’t.” The ethics of the situation are between you and your rabbi. But if you write vaguely, readers will suspect you’re dishonest. And even if they don’t, your vagueness will cause them to have vague thoughts, which isn’t what most writers are aiming for. I want my readers to see images and/or form specific, clear ideas.
Instead of “In most cases it’s healthy and necessary,” how about “It can help consumers avoid playing $150 for shows that will bore them”? Something like that. I’m trying to obey the old writing rule of showing rather than telling.
Instead of “…but this constant complaining has brought out the worst in us,” how about “… but this constant complaining elevates the critic above the play, and for many patrons, shows are now pucks in a hockey game of Who Can Gripe Loudest’?
Compare:
“Disillusionment with the theatre is common. In most cases it’s healthy and necessary, but this constant complaining has brought out the worst in us.”
“My friends used to rave about Broadway. Now all they do is complain that the sets look cheap, the actors are amateurs, and the writing is pedestrian. Smart criticism can help consumers avoid playing $150 for shows that will bore them, but this constant complaining elevates the critic above the play, and for many patrons, shows are now pucks in a hockey game of Who Can Gripe Loudest.”
Avoid passive phrasing. Here’s an example:
“It’s known that most people love beer.”
Go through your prose and look for verbs that don’t have clear owners. Who knows that most people love beer? How do they know it? Passive phrasing is sneaky. It’s often used to make an idea sound profound, or like common knowledge, without giving any evidence of profundity or commonality. I was sneaky in my last sentence! “It’s often used?” Often used by whom?
What I should have written is “Friends of mine often use…” or “Bad writers often user…”
Sneakiness aside, I will once again point out that the goal or clear writing is to evoke sensation. In the real word, stuff rarely just happens without a motivating force: ideas aren’t known. People know ideas.
When, in real life, something seems to happen without a cause, we’re bothered by it. We go looking for a cause. Sometimes we go to extreme lengths, inventing myths or whole religions just to explain what makes the rain or who puts presents under the tree on Christmas morning. So feed the reader what the meal he wants! If something is happening, tell him who is doing what to whom!
(Pay attention to politicians – and anyone behaving politically, such as a spokesperson for a company that has just been caught in some scandal. You’ll hear enough passive language to fill twenty iPods. “Mistakes were made.” Etc. I always want to stand these folks against the wall, point bazookas at their heads, and ask, “WHO MADE THE MISTAKES? MISTAKES DON’T JUST MAKE THEMSELVES.”
You’ll also see a lot of passive language on Quora, from people on the losing side of a debate. They use it to fake profundity and to make it seem like they have sources when they don’t: “There’s a school of thought that…” or “It’s well known that…” Not all passive phrases are written in the grammatical passive voice. To be passive, as I’m defining it, a phrase just needs to fail to identify its motivator: a school of thought? Which school and who thought it?)
Play with words. Cultivate habits of crossword-puzzling, punning, rapping, rhyming and, as George Constanza says, “bebopping and scatting.” You may or may not be able to scat in whatever it is you’re writing now, but wordplay will stretch your mind and make you more comfortable with writing and words in general. Let words be your sandbox.
I have a game in which I try to slip at least one bit of playfulness (a sneaky pun, a coinage, a noun used as a verb, etc) into everything I write, even if it’s really formal, serious prose. Of course, if it’s formal, I may have to hide the wordplay, but that’s half the fun.
Another trick is to pick a random word from the dictionary and work it into your prose – in a natural way – no matter how much it seemingly doesn’t belong. You may fail, but just trying stretches you.
Passivity
In 90% of cases, the worst kind of sentence or phrase is the passive one. I’m referring to both the grammatical passive-voice and to any phrase which doesn’t indicate who is doing what to whom.
Example: “Mistakes were made.”
Some passive sentences do contain all the information needed to understand who is doing what to whom, but words are in a funky order:
Example: “Mistakes were made by John.”
It’s almost seems as if John took no part in the mistakes he made. As if “making mistakes” just happened to him.
Though they have their uses, sentences like these usually lack clear imagery and avoid social reasoning (Who made the mistakes?). Worse, they often cloak dishonesty (“I’d rather not say who made the mistakes”) or muddle-headedness (“I don’t know who made the mistakes.”)
Here are some possible fixes:
“John screwed up.”
“The Planning Committee bungled the whole affair.”
(A passive version of the above is “The whole affair was bungled by the Planning Committee.” Compare that to the active version and notice that it’s harder to parse. Our brains tend to want to know who the doer is before we worry about what he’s doing.)
If you take a look at Quora questions, you’ll see many of them expressed with passive phrases:
“Is kissing considered too-forward on the first date?”
Considered by whom?
“Are children indoctrinated by Religion?”
Do you mean, “Do religious people indoctrinate their children?”
The writer of the kissing question is probably using passive phrasing because he’s confused. He has a vague idea that “it’s not done,” but he’s unsure who makes the rules and when they should be followed. The second writer is playing politics. He’s passive-aggressively accusing theists of indoctrinating children while leaving himself wiggle room to back away if necessary.
(I copped out above, when I wrote “you’ll see many of them expressed with passive phrases.” Who is doing all this expressing. Perhaps I meant “Question writers express themselves with passive sentences,” but shied away from openly accusing them. I only caught this mistake when I read my first draft.)
My point here isn’t to judge rhetoricians. It’s to point out that passive writing tends to be unclear. It’s not impenetrable. Rather, it blows a vague cloud towards the reader rather than something in sharp focus.
So as you redraft, sniff out passive sentences and ask yourself “Who is doing what to whom?” If you don’t know, at least consider being honest, writing “Some unknown person made mistakes” instead of “Mistakes were made.” Or, if you’d rather wax passive, know that you’re trading clarity for deception. You’re trying to hide what you don’t know.
The main exception is when the focus of the sentence is on the object rather than the subject: “the ball was then caught by that kid with no arms!” You don’t want to focus on the person who threw the ball, and you also (perhaps) don’t want to say, “The kid with no arms caught the ball,” because you fear that if you end that way, the reader will focus on the ball instead of the kid.” Okay, good. As always, know what you’re doing. Break rules for a purpose.
Memory
The other ingredient worth keeping in mind is that it’s tough to keep things in mind. When we read, we have to process hieroglyphics into parseable words and sentences, and we have to think back to the subject when we reach the verb. Most of the time, in order to understand the current sentence, we have to keep the previous one in mind, and we may also have to predict what’s coming next.
Many experiments have shown that working memory—the main kind of memory people employ while reading—can only handle around five concepts at once. For some people, it can be as few as three.
Read these two passages and see if you can feel a difference in the mental strain they cause:
Every other Wednesday, after he’d returned from work (in an Investment bank, where he toiled for much pay but little pleasure), John, an old friend of mine, who I first met in Mrs. Feldstein’s Social Studies class, where we studied New Guinea tribesmen and the U.S. Constitution, would pour himself a generous glass of whisky and sip, his feet propped up on the coffee table.
John would pour himself a generous amount a whisky, sip it, and prop his feet up on the coffee table. He was an old schoolfriend of mine, who I first met in Mrs. Feldstein’s Social Studies class, where we studied New Guinea tribesmen and the U.S. Constitution. Now, John works an an investment bank, where he never has any fun, though they pay him well.
The first passage strains the brain, because there’s so much verbiage between the subject (John) and the verb (would pour). In fact, there’s a forest of words before the subject even appears. So your poor working memory has to hold the preamble in mind while scanning for the sentence’s topic. Then, once it’s latched onto “John,” it has to keep him in mind while swimming through an ocean of words, only finding out what John is doing once it’s reached the the opposite shore.
Granted, the first passage has a kind of baroque charm, so I’m not forbidding you to write that way. Just be aware of what you’re doing. Write a maze twisty prose passages when the whole point of the exercise is to tangle the reader in luscious words and phrases. If you’re trying to make a clear point, ease the cognitive load.
How often is it allowed to repeat one phrase in a paragraph? This question previously had details. They are now in a comment. Profile photo for Marcus Geduld Marcus Geduld , Published author, lifelong reader. Answered Jan 16, 2014 Allowed? There’s no writing police.
Here’s the problem with repetitions: they call attention to the sentence’s mechanics. Which makes them similar to this:
“On Monday, I 8 dinner at with my aunt, Elizabeth.”
My goal as the writer was to make you, the reader, focus on dinner and aunt Elizabeth, but you were at least partly distracted by my use of “8” instead of “ate.” Most writers want their readers to focus on whatever it is they’re writing about, not about spelling, grammar, and other stylistic choices.
Which is why it’s often bad to give readers a bad experience with repetitions, as I’ve done with the word “bad” in this sentence. Its bad because readers notice it and wind up distracted by your bad word (or bad phrase) choice rather than whatever it is you’re writing about. Which is bad.
There’s no magic number of repetitions that’s allowed or forbidden. Read your first draft out loud—you’re doing that, right?—and notice where repetitions and other clunky constructions make you focus on the scaffolding rather than the subject.
‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father: But, you must know, your father lost a father; That father lost, lost his …
[https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-organize-diverse-sentence-patterns-when-writing/answer/Marcus-Geduld]
Let’s start simply and play with conjunctions: and, but, or, and so on.
You wrote …
How can I organize diverse sentence patterns when writing? First of all, English is my second language. When I am writing, I feel my expression is so monotonous. I read some writing books, but they don’t take effect. I am rather depressed, so could you help me?
Notice that, as a simple variation, we can join sentences two and three together with an “and.”
First of all, English is my second language, and when I am writing, I feel my expression is so monotonous.
With a little tweaking, we can add on the next sentence:
First of all, English is my second language, and when I am writing, I feel my expression is so monotonous, and even though I read some writing books, they don’t take effect.
In fact, we can join all of the sentences together, using short phrases as glue:
How can I organize diverse sentence patterns when writing? because English is my second language, and when I am writing, I feel my expression is monotonous, and even though I’ve read some writing books, they don’t take effect, so I am rather depressed, and I’m hoping you can help me.
I’m not suggesting you should write that way (at least in your final draft), merging all your sentences into one long sentence; I’m just opening up possibilities: trying to get you to be playful with language.
What if we kept the general structure of the long sentence but ended with a short one, like the punchline of a joke?
How can I organize diverse sentence patterns when writing? because English is my second language, and when I am writing, I feel my expression is monotonous, and even though I’ve read some writing books, they don’t take effect, so I am rather depressed. Can you help me?
Now, let’s look at which groupings make sense and which don’t. (This isn’t a logic puzzle. There won’t be a perfectly right or wrong answer. It’s largely a matter of how you want to organize your ideas.)
To me, The first part—the question—does not naturally join onto “English is my second language.” They’re obviously related (because English is your second language, you’re not sure how to vary English sentences), but there still seems to be a little bit of a mental shift between those two ideas. So, let’s separate them by removing the “because”:
How can I organize diverse sentence patterns when writing? English is my second language, and when I am writing, I feel my expression is monotonous, and even though I’ve read some writing books, they don’t take effect, so I am rather depressed. Can you help me?
I’m happy with the next few thoughts being joined together. True, “English is my second language” is a bit distinct from “… my expression is monotonous,” but they’re related by cause-and-effect: it’s because English is your second language that your writing is monotonous.
You could make that clear by using “so” instead of “and”
English is my second language, so when I am writing, my expression is monotonous.
Or maybe you don’t want to imply such a strong causal link. In which case “and” is fine. With “and” you’re saying, “There are two problems: (1) my unfamiliarity with English and (2) my monotonous sentences. Maybe the two are related; maybe not.
Moving on, the part about reading writing books seems pretty distinct from what came before, so I’m going to separate it. Here’s the result:
How can I organize diverse sentence patterns when writing? English is my second language, and when I am writing, I feel my expression is monotonous. Even though I’ve read some writing books, they don’t take effect, so I am rather depressed. Can you help me?
To me, the above has a nice, conversational sound to it. It’s not monotonous, and the connected parts suggest an underlying logic of thought.
It’s wrong for writing teachers say students should vary their sentence structure. That leads to random, nonsensical or gratuitous constructions, just thrown in for variety’s sake. It separates form from function.
“Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface” – Victor Hugo.
Or, rather, it should be! In good writing, style is never ornamentation. It’s an expression of the ideas that underly the text.
Seasoned writers may not consciously think about it. They may have an innate feeling for rhythm and naturally write out their ideas in sensible groupings. But if you look closely, their organization makes sense.
Until you get more comfortable with English, I urge you to try the exercise, above. Fuse all your sentences together as best you can. Ask yourself how each sentence relates logically to the next one (or to the one preceding it), and join them with a conjunction. You can always do this, even if two sentences are entirely unrelated.
Example:
My mother is 74-years old. I’m hungry.
My mother is 74-years-old, but, changing the subject, I’ll say I feel hungry.
Yes, that’s tortuous, but it clarifies how the two sentences are related. (Think of a non-sequitur as a kind or relationship.) As you study English, lavish time on logical connections. Get to know the nuances of “and”, “but”, “because”, “so”, “in addition”, “on the other hand”, “therefor”, etc. Join all your sentences together, logically, and then pull the ones apart that make sense as standalones. Think of periods as marking a new thought and paragraph changes as marking even bigger shifts.
Always be playful and open to expressive possibilities. For instance, on my first pass, I might decide that the following is logical:
On Wednesday, I checked the mail, fed the dog, watched some TV, and then wept for an hour, face down on my bed.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It has a nice rhythm to it. But maybe I want to emphasize the last bit, separating it from the pack.
On Wednesday, I checked the mail, fed the dog, and watched TV. Then I wept for an hour, face down on my bed.
I could even write…
On Wednesday, I checked the mail, fed the dog, and watched TV. Then I wept for an hour. Face down on my bed.
Notice how that ending pops the final image into sharp focus, even though it’s a sentence fragment that would shock my old English teacher.
None of those variations is right or wrong. They are all slightly different ideas. Each shines a mental spotlight in a unique way.
Keep your focus always on drawing the reader towards various ideas: showing him what’s important and how ideas are related. Never am I just changing things around for variety’s sake. It exists because there’s variety in the ways one idea connects—or disconnects—from another.
And, though it may be cliche, the journey is as important as the destination; sometimes more important. Think about how you’re leading the reader from one idea to another. Sometimes you want to drive him straight there; at other times, you want to tease him, taking a detour that only arrives at the destination via dirt roads and strange alleys.
Here’s one more thing worth keeping in mind: the core sentence structure in English is subject-verb (or subject-verb-object):
The dog ran.
The dog caught the ball.
As soon as readers detect a subject, their brains start waiting for a verb. If I start a sentence by saying, “My brother … “ and then pause, listeners will wonder what my brother did. By not telling them immediately, I create suspense:
My brother, who recently broke his leg …
Notice the difference (in terms of tension and release) in these two alternatives:
- My brother, who recently broke his leg, just married his high school sweetheart.
- My brother just married his high school sweetheart, only a couple of weeks after breaking his leg.
Again, no right or wrong. What affect are you trying to have on the reader? Are you trying to just “state the facts” or create tension? What’s the main thrust of the idea, that my brother recently broke his leg or that he just got married?
I bring this up, because prose variety is often created by adding in (or removing) modifying clauses: adverb phrases, adjective phrases, etc.
- My dad wrote a book.
- My dad, a kind-hearted man who is nevertheless often thoughtless (because he’s absent-minded, not cruel), wrote a book.
Play with modifiers, but always notice how they affect the tension in the sentence. Consider how much (or little) space to the put between subject and verb. Note that, depending on your intent, you could also write this:
My dad wrote a book. He’s a kindhearted man who is nevertheless often thoughtless (because he’s absent-minded, not cruel).
My final word of advice is play, play, play! Always think of English as a playground, not a legal system. Find your patterns by joining things together, pulling things apart, and inserting bits in between other bits. Maneuver the reader through your ideas as if you’re leading him by the hand through a hedge maze. He’s lost; you’re not.
He raced through the building, opened the door, and dashed through the skyway into the next building
I have issues with it. Others have already mentioned one of them, which is the repetition of “building.” How about something more specific for the first instance, such as “He raced through the lobby, opened the door …”? My second issue is with “raced” and “dashed.” I commend you for using strong, simple verbs, but when you use two similar ones like this, one after another, it’s as if you’re suggesting “race” means something different from “dash.” But since I don’t know the difference, I’m puzzled. I know that a race can be long (you can race for hours) and a dash is generally short, but you don’t seem to be making that distinction. Perhaps you’re trying to avoid the building-building problem, and you don’t want to write “raced … raced …” or “dashed … dashed …”, and, if so, you’re smart to avoid that sort of repetition. My suggestion is to assume the reader understands your character is moving quickly. You don’t need to keep reinforcing it. Instead, focus on other aspects of his actions. Maybe … “He raced through the lobby, opened the door, and nearly collided with a pregnant woman in the skyway as he entered the next building” Or, if you want to keep the focus on his journey, try to come up with something clearly distinguishable from “raced.” Maybe … “He raced through the lobby, opened the door, and stumbled through the skyway into the next building.” Or, if you want to emphasize speed, consider losing the door: “He raced through down the hall, through the lobby, and across the skyway into the next building.” By the way, “dashed” is a great verb, but in my mind there’s something dandyish about it, as in, “I’m just going to dash off a few letters before luncheon.”
What he had to do once he got to New York was a very important matte
It’s grammatically correct, but it’s a clunky sentence in my opinion.
“What he had to do” is a boring, un-evocative phrase. How about this? “His task in New York was very important.”
Even that’s not great, since I can’t visualize (or hear, smell, taste or touch) a “task,” but it’s a little better.
“… was very important” is also bland. How about “His task in New York was crucial”? At least that cuts down on the string of ho-hum words.
But the whole sentence is telling rather than showing. It’s avoiding agency (“Important to whom?”) and imagery. It’s hard for me to make recommendations, because I don’t know the context, but I’d go with something like this (changed to match whatever make sense in your story).
He knew his wife would leave him if he failed in New York.
Unless he could find the bomb and defuse it, thousands of people in Midtown would die.
He stomach cramped. What if he failed in New York? What then? He popped a Xanax and crossed Fifth Avenue, heading towards Broadway.
It’s pretty hard to avoid sentences of the form “X was Y” (e.g. “What he had to do was important”), but they’re worth minimizing, as they don’t move stories forward. They just assert equivalencies and make claims about objects having traits.
Every writer would benefit from spending a few months writing in E-Prime. I forced myself to do it for a year, while insisting my prose felt totally natural, and it helped my writing more than any other exercise I’ve ever tried.
Humans have limited bandwidth. In case anyone thinks I’m calling him stupid, I’m including myself in the category of “humans with limited bandwidth.” The famous number is seven (plus-or-minus two), meaning that we can hold five-to-nine simultaneous ideas in our working memories. In reality, I’ve found it to be way less.
This may be because, if you put two images in the same sentence, other aspects also take up bandwidth, such as parsing grammar and understanding the meanings of individual words.
In my work, I write many emails that contain instructions. I’ve found that if a single email contains two instructions, at least half the people receiving it will ignore one of them. And I’m not talking about dumb or lazy people. I’m talking about very smart people with years of professional experience and advanced degrees.
If I write “Please come to the 4pm meeting and bring a pen,” many will show up without pens or bring pens to the wrong meeting. I will have slightly better luck if I break the tasks in two separate sentences:
People seem to process a single sentence as a thought-unit, so if you pack in two ideas, you put one at peril, and you don’t get to choose which one. It’s a toss-up whether pens or meeting will win.
Even if readers receive both ideas, the two may dilute each other. “My favorite food is chocolate” is a stronger sentence than “My favorite food is chocolate, and my mom’s least-favorite animal is the penguin.”
If one of the two ideas evokes strong emotions, it may completely crowd out the other: “Please bring a number two pencil to the meeting, which will be about how some races are inferior to others.” If you write a sentence like that, expect lots of people to come to the meeting without number two pencils. (They may, however, bring guns to the meeting.)
Here’s an uncomfortable result of narrow bandwidths: for years, I’ve been struggling with how to handle neutral gender in writing. I’m sad to say, I’ve yet to find a solution that works for me. I refuse to use clunky constructions like h/she, and I’m not happy with “they” as a singular pronoun.
My discontent has nothing to do with grammar. As a writer, I consider my primary job to be evoking images in readers’ brains. And when testing words and phrases, I must use my own brain as a proxy.
I am incapable of imagining a they. I’m so influenced by my gender-obsessed culture, when I think of a person, I imagine a man or a woman. I apologize to mixed-gendered people for saying that. It’s biased, but true. “They” does not evoke an image the way “he” or “she” does.
Which leaves me with two options: I can use “he” (or “she”) in all cases, or I can alternate between “he” and “she.” Though I tend towards the former, I’m unhappy with it. I believe the many women who tell me they can’t identify with “he.” They tell me that they don’t feel sentences like “if someone wants to please me, he should buy me candy” apply to them. Or, at least, they have to go through mental gymnastics to make that sentence apply, and those cartwheels and summersaults may use up some of their precious bandwidth. Which means less candy for me!
But I also am unhappy with “If you see a cop working a crime scene, don’t distract her with questions.” Because I have sexist defaults in my brain, I imagine a cop as a man. I know there are female officers, but unless I stop to think about that, a generic cop is male to my brain.
Which means that when I read that sentence, part of my brain is reacting to the surprise of finding “her” where it expects “him.” It’s a very mild surprise, but I’m aware of it. It’s actually a pleasing surprise. As a Feminist, I’m glad the writer hasn’t fallen prey to gender stereotypes.
Still, the surprise sucks up some bandwidth. My brain is trying to simultaneously think about the writer’s fair-mindedness and the main point of the sentence, which is leaving cops to their work. That point is at least somewhat diluted by my thoughts about avoided sexism.
Some readers may think I’m being petty – that the human brain has bandwidth enough to cope with little surprises like “her” while still following the writer’s main point. And that may be true.
But my main concern is that writers think these matters through – that regardless of what they decide, they take bandwidth limitations seriously and think about how much they are taxing readers.
Given my concerns, it’s strange that my favorite writer is Shakespeare, a man who packed so many layers into his lines, the reader’s bandwidth fills and then bursts. If writing is meant to be read over and over, meditated on and discussed, my points above may not apply. They don’t apply to most poetry. They don’t always apply to fiction. They don’t even necessarily apply to non-fiction, if it aims for something beyond mere reporting.
Again, my main hope is that writers think about bandwidth and take it seriously, not that they always make the decision to “keep it simple, stupid.” As Shakespeare said, “suit the action to the word and the word to the action.”
Or, if you want to take the reader on a long, circuitous trip – a trip full of meandering paths to dark corners of your limbic system, a trip where stepping off the path and into the woods is the whole point of the journey, a trip where, as in a seduction, the pursuit is as much fun as the climax – you might want to keep it long and, rather than leaping straight “to the point,” you might, instead, want to circle around the point and sidle up to it, now and then gently prodding it with your foot, as you would a dangerous, gorgeous sleeping creature.
When Paul reached for his dropped gun, Jack shot at the bottom part of his leg three times.
or
When Paul reached for his gun on the floor, Jack shot at the bottom part of his leg three times. Visualization like Frame 0001; Frame 0002……
Yes, I can, but both “his dropped gun” and “his gun on the floor” seem odd and clumsy to me. Why don’t we already know Paul dropped his gun, and, if we do, why are you telling us again?
In context, I imagine something like this:
“The gun slipped from Paul’s hand and thudded on the floor. As he reached for it, Jack shot him in the leg.”
My other problem is with “the bottom part of his leg.” It’s like an attempt to be specific without actually being specific, similar to, “a hair towards the back of his head, but not quite at the back, but not too far forward, either.”
I would either just write “leg,” as I did above, or mention a specific part by name, such as “shin” or “ankle.”
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23 March 2019