Building Great Sentences (10 page)

(2) Modifying phrase adding information about the base clause,

(2) Modifying phrase adding information about the base clause.

Supply a new base clause—say “I wrote furiously for two days,” supply three modifying phrases that add information to that base clause, and you might get:

(1) I wrote furiously for three days,

(2) never stopping to sleep,

(2) rarely stopping to eat,

(2) totally consumed by the need to finish my novel.

Or think of that marvelous subordinate sentence from Sinclair Lewis (“He dipped his hands in the bichloride solution and shook them, a quick shake, fingers down, like the fingers of a pianist above the keys”) and see if you can supply a new base clause and then develop it by adding three subordinate phrases, each pointing to the immediately preceding clause or phrase.

We do
not
actually think like this when we write! This is a highly artificial and arbitrary exercise, but there is no better way to internalize the various logic patterns available to the writer who knows how cumulative sentences work.

Cumulative Tweaks and Tighten-Ups

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. . . . Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

—Virginia Woolf in a letter to V. Sackville-West, 16 March 1926

W
ell, style may well be all about rhythm, as Virginia Woolf claimed, but I have to disagree with her claim that style is a very simple matter, and I certainly don't think of prose rhythm as a simple matter. But it is hugely important and we'll explore some of its beauty and complexity in later chapters. For now, I call attention to Woolf's assertion that rhythm goes far deeper than words and use it to support my claim that rhythm also goes far deeper than grammar and offers us a great chance to understand the appeal of cumulative syntax. The last chapter contained a lot of fairly technical discussions and used a number of terms to describe the differing mechanics of coordinate and subordinate and mixed cumulative sentences. The really good news I have for those of you whose eyes glaze over when someone gets into the intricacies of grammatical description is that you really need to remember very, very few of the terms, labels, and definitions I've introduced to understand the seductive advantage of cumulative syntax.

It may be easier to write cumulative sentences if we understand their basic grammar and logical construction, but one of the beauties of this syntax is that we don't have to think very much about its design once we become familiar with its distinctive rhythms. We may groan when assaulted by sentence-level diagram after sentence-level diagram, but when we read these sentences aloud, our ear picks up the rhythms formed by the logical relationships between and among their base clauses and modifying phrases. Once your ear picks up the insistent rhythms of these sentences, those very rhythms can generate new cumulative levels.

I don't mean to suggest there's anything murky or mystical about this process. It's really very similar to what happens when we learn to ride a bicycle. We can read all the instructions and rules in the world for riding a bicycle, but nothing takes the place of actually getting on a bike and going through the exhilarating and scary process of learning that our body balances us without any conscious thought on our part. Our bodies learn the rhythm, the feel of riding a bike, and once we've internalized that knowledge, we never need to think about instructions or rules for balancing on a bike again. Never again, that is, until we need to teach our children how to ride, and then we go through the frustrating experience of trying to teach them by explaining what they need to do, all the while knowing we just have to push them and let them fall until their bodies get it the way ours did.

If There's Any Magic in Learning to Be a Better Writer, This Is It!

Probably the best and most useful advice I can give to anyone who wants to master writing cumulative sentences is this: read them aloud. Read every sentence you write aloud; read every example of cumulative form you find aloud. Read them aloud in the bathroom or in a closet if reading aloud makes you self-conscious, but trust your ear to understand cumulative rhythm before you consciously understand all the principles involved in its construction. This is such a simple, immediate, and surefire way to improve our writing that it amazes me every year when I have a tough time getting all of my students to do this. It's easy to tell who does and who does not read their sentences aloud before class. When I have them read their work aloud in class, it almost never fails that they pause or stop dead at precisely the point where, had they read the sentence aloud in private, their ear would have told them it needed work.

There's nothing mystical about this process. Your ear will detect problems or awkwardness or alert you to the need to add more information to your sentences, because the parts that sound clunky or go bump when you read them aloud almost always sound bad because the logic of the sentence needs tweaking. Either the modifying phrase needs a clear target or object of modification, the agent of an action needs to be specified, the modifying phrase needs more overlap with the word it modifies, or something else is off. Our eyes are very forgiving and frequently fail to catch these problems, but our ears almost never let us down, alerting us to something that needs fixing in the sentence even if we can't easily describe the problem.

For me, this most frequently means I'll think a sentence needs an extra beat, an extra word to smooth out its rhythm, and it's almost always the case that what my ear hears as the need for an extra beat turns out to be that the modifying phrase needs to be more specific or to make its connection to the preceding phrase more clear by backtracking to point more clearly to what it modifies, or by moving forward to add new information.

For example, if I hear the following sentences, I hear something in each that doesn't quite ring true or that needs just a bit of tweaking. Try reading the following sentences aloud and see if you hear what I hear:

A large hand grabbed my hair, sharply forcing my head back, jarring my neck, muscles stretched tautly.

The lumberjack's ax split the base, toppling the tree, crashing to the ground.

The rough concrete tore through my jeans, embedding small pieces of gravel into my knee, ruining another pair of pants, a wonder they lasted this long.

I started to run, something large landing on my back, getting nowhere.

The first of these sentences moves along nicely—“A large hand grabbed my hair, sharply forcing my head back, jarring my neck”—until that final modifying phrase: “muscles stretched tautly.” That final phrase sounds odd because it doesn't make clear whether those taut muscles belong to the speaker of the sentence or to the person whose large hand grabbed the speaker's hair. Accordingly, we need to tweak the sentence to clear up that ambiguity, and we do it this way: “A large hand grabbed my hair, sharply forcing my head back, jarring my neck, tautly stretching my muscles.” Or even better because it picks up and reemphasizes “neck” with the overlapping word “throat”: “A large hand grabbed my hair, sharply forcing my head back, jarring my neck, tautly stretching the muscles in my throat.”

And better still if we honor Professor Strunk's injunction to “omit needless words” and cut both “sharply” and “tautly” since both are already implicit: “A large hand grabbed my hair, forcing my head back, jarring my neck, stretching the muscles in my throat.”

Remember that second sentence? “The lumberjack's ax split the base, toppling the tree, crashing to the ground.” It sounds a bit odd when it gets to that final modifying phrase because “crashing” doesn't really have anything to modify. If it's supposed to modify “ax” or the entire base clause, the sentence should read something like: “The lumberjack's ax split the base, toppling the tree, the split causing it to crash to the ground.” If “crashing to the ground” is supposed to modify “base,” the sentence should read something like: “The lumberjack's ax split the base, toppling the tree, sending the base crashing to the ground.”

Or if this is really meant to be a subordinate cumulative sentence with “crashing to the ground” modifying the preceding phrase, “toppling the tree,” then the sentence should read something like: “The lumberjack's ax split the base, toppling the tree, crashing the tree to the ground.” Or better still because it adds important information and smooths out the rhythm a bit: “The lumberjack's ax split the base, toppling the tree, sending the massive oak crashing to the ground.”

Similarly, and I bet you can see why, I'd want to improve those last two sentences by making them read something like this. Remember the original: “The rough concrete tore through my jeans, embedding small pieces of gravel into my knee, ruining another pair of pants, a wonder they lasted this long.” I'd revise this to read: “The rough concrete tore through my jeans, embedding small pieces of gravel into my knee, ruining another pair of pants, the wonder being that they had lasted this long.”

Now, let's look at the final example: “I started to run, something large landing on my back, getting nowhere.” I'd revise this to read: “I started to run, something large suddenly landing on my back, preventing me from escaping.”

These are only a few of the ways in which the original sentences could be made to sound better, the improvement in the way they sound resulting from our tightening up the logical relationships within the sentences, providing missing objects of modification, or clarifying some aspect of what is being described. One of the great beauties of the cumulative sentence is that it always presents us with a number of different workarounds that will smooth over rough spots in the way the sentence sounds or in the logical relationships of its parts.

One final example of the point I'm trying to make: If I hear the sentence “He became a pirate, a murderous rogue,” I may well want to improve the sound and the sense of the sentence by backtracking and focusing a moment longer on “pirate,” and then making what I mean by “murderous rogue” a bit more specific. So I'm likely to revise my sentence to read: “He became a pirate, one of those scourges of the sea, a murderous rogue, indiscriminately killing both passengers and crew of the ships he captured.”

I like the sound of this extended sentence more than the sound of the one I started with, but more important, this sentence now displays the kind of overlap of information that gives the cumulative sentence its clarity and insistent force. Now, readers see not only that “He became a pirate,” but that the pirate he became was a “scourge of the seas” and a “murderous rogue,” and they also learn why he might be called a murderous rogue.

Driving Versus Going Under the Hood: The Mechanics of Adding Sentence Levels

Years ago, I had a wise colleague who liked to explain that the difference between students who loved to read literature and students who became English majors was like the difference between folks who wanted their cars to take them places, and those who insisted on knowing and understanding the mechanics of what was actually under the hood. I think that having at least a rough idea of what's under the hood in cumulative sentences makes it easier to write them, but I also think that recognizing the distinctive sounds and rhythms of cumulative sentences is more than enough to allow most writers to drive them wherever they want to go.

Having said that, it's time for us to go back under the hood for a few more minutes. More specifically, let's consider some of the advantages of coordinate cumulative sentences. My former colleague at Iowa, Carl Klaus, one of the most important influences on my understanding of prose style and a masterful stylist in his own right, offers these examples of coordinate cumulative sentences, written by his students, each with two second-level modifying phrases:

The dog lunged toward him, fangs bared, eyes rolled back in anger.

The guillotine falls, slicing the air, heads rolling on the ground.

The storm raged on, a brutal assault, indiscriminate in its destruction.

Her hair hung long and loose down her back, blue-black in the stage lights, flowing with each animated gesture as she played the piano solo.

She served the dessert, a French pastry affair, dripping with dark chocolate.

The armored men hurled themselves into battle, metal crashing, screams fading.

I photographed her against the sunset, a goddess, her white gauze robe glowing blond with mellow light.

Most cumulative sentences don't have more than a couple of modifying phrases, and the cumulative sentence with two modifying phrases isn't a bad goal for writers hoping to make their sentences more effective. A cumulative sentence with only a single second level is more satisfying than would be the sentence without a second level, but a single cumulative modifying phrase only begins to tap the advantages of cumulative syntax. If a sentence takes only a single cumulative step, it can't really be said to be either coordinate or subordinate, since we need at least two modifying phrases before we can make that determination. Accordingly, while a cumulative sentence with only a single modifying phrase does take the important step that gives the sentence a second level of meaning or texture, such a sentence does not plug into either the sound or the logical advantages of longer, more pronounced cumulative sentences.

The Benefits of Adding More Than a Single Modifying Phrase

However, the coordinate cumulative sentence with two second-level modifying phrases, such as those from Carl Klaus, offers writers a number of opportunities for parallels and parallel rhythms, insistent repetitions, and backtracking overlaps and allows writers to make clear their control of this important syntax. Like Francis Christensen, I'd love for my writing students to become “sentence acrobats” who can “dazzle by their syntactic dexterity,” but I feel like I've given them a valuable skill if they simply start incorporating into their writing a few cumulative sentences with at least two modifying phrases.

When writers take the next step, adding a third modifying phrase to their sentences, their prose becomes even more effective, their control of syntax even more impressive. The beauty of the coordinate cumulative syntax is that this next step does not require mastery of any new principles. It just asks the writers to add one more modifying phrase, similar to or even almost identical with the first two second-level modifying phrases they've used. For example, returning for a moment to two examples we borrowed from Carl Klaus, we can easily add a third modifying phrase to each. To the sentence “The dog lunged toward him, fangs bared, eyes rolled back in anger,” we can simply add “his attack swift and unexpected.” To the sentence “The storm raged on, a brutal assault, indiscriminate in its destruction,” we can easily add a third modifying phrase, “flattening houses as if they were made of matchsticks.”