Building Great Sentences (21 page)

Ellipsis:
to omit one or more words that are obviously necessary but must be inferred to make a construction grammatically complete—as we saw in Bacon's “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man” or we can see in Nabokov's “I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam.”

Schemes of Repetition

Alliteration:
to repeat the initial consonants in neighboring or in grammatically corresponding words—Spiro Agnew's description of the press as “nattering nabobs of negatism” gives us an example of this serial technique used as a bludgeon.

Anaphora:
to repeat a word or phrase at the beginning of successive sentences, clauses, or phrases—“I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for that streak of white under the weasel's chin and held on, held on through mud and into the wild rose, held on for a dearer life,” from Annie Dillard's “Living Like a Weasel.” Eldridge Cleaver revealed his control of both anaphora and ellipsis in his striking declaration in
Soul on Ice:
“I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation.”

Anadiplosis:
to repeat a word that ends one phrase, clause, or sentence at the beginning of the next—“Learn as though you would live forever, live as though you would die tomorrow.”

Assonance:
to repeat similar vowel sounds in neighboring or in grammatically corresponding words—“His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone; uncollected, unconnected, loose-leaf, and blown,” also from Annie Dillard.

Chiasmus:
to repeat a grammatical structure and the words it contains, but to reverse the order of the key words in the second phrase, clause, or sentence. We've seen the bumper-sticker example of chiasmus—“When the going gets tough, the tough get going” and I'm particularly fond of Hunter Thompson's variation, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” But chiasmus can be a very effective and memorable persuasive device: “The press is so powerful in its image-making role that it can make a criminal look like he's the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal,” again from Eldridge Cleaver.

Epanalepsis:
to repeat the same word or phrase at the beginning and end of a clause or sentence—“Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea,” from Chief Seattle.

Epistrophe:
to repeat the same word or phrase at the end of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences—“They loved football, they ate football, they slept football.” Of course, probably the most familiar examples we have of epistrophe are “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” and “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Isocolon:
a form of parallelism that stresses corresponding words, phrases, causes, and sentences of equal length and similar structure. Churchill's famous “Never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few” illustrates the form, and his “He is asked to stand, he wants to sit, and he is expected to lie” reveals some of its potential for pointed humor.

Polyptoton:
to repeat words with the same root but different forms or endings—“Poverty and isolation produce impoverished and isolated minds” is an example of polyptoton at the start of a much longer sentence in William Gass's
On Being Blue
. Matthew Clark points to Nabokov's fondness for polyptoton in
Ada
, where he refers to “a specular, and hence speculatory phenomenon,” “divinities and divines,” and the “collected works of uncollected authors.”

Polysyndeton:
to repeat conjunctions between coordinate words, phrases, or clauses in a series—Joan Didion frequently relies on polysyndeton in her writing, as in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” which opens with the almost polysyndeton “This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country,” then quickly gets down to the real thing: “It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, whenever the wind blows.” Yeats gives us a wonderful example of the calming, slowing effect of polysyndeton in the opening lines of his poem “When You Are Old”: “When you are old and gray and full of sleep” and I bet more than a few of us can supply the next phrase, “And nodding by the fire.”

Symploce:
this is a “twofer” scheme in which the combination in a sequence of phrases, clauses, or sentences of anaphora (repeating the first word) and epistrophe (repeating the final word) creates symploce, as William Blake employs this scheme in his “Proverbs of Hell”: “The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God.”

Tricolon:
Matthew Clark, reminding us of the human tendency to compose groups of three, specifies that a tripling of phrases, clauses, or sentences is called tricolon, and adds, “if the phrases are arranged so that they progressively increase in length, the figure is called tricolon crescendo,” offering Nabokov's reference in
Ada
to a character's “long, too long, never too long life” as an example. Obviously, most if not all of our examples of three-part parallel series display some form of tricolon.

These are but a few of the rhetorical schemes and tropes that can create and intensify parallelism in general and three-part serials in particular. There is some disagreement about the difference between a trope and a scheme, but generally tropes have primarily to do with meaning, while schemes have to do with the ordering of words and sounds. Accordingly, we might think of a metaphor as a trope, while repetition or alliteration would be a scheme. Let's just call both
rhetorical moves
. Richard Lanham specifies thirty-four different rhetorical moves associated with the creation of balance or antithesis, and thirty-six associated with parallelism of letters, syllables, sounds, words, clauses, phrases, sentences, and ideas, so this small sampling only begins to suggest the care with which ancient orators and writers constructed their discourse. To be effective writers we certainly don't need to command all of the forms, but just knowing that these forms exist increases the likelihood that we will find some occasion in which it makes sense to tap some of their power.

Now let's return to thinking about some of the less structured ways in which balance and serial forms can interact with each other and about the possible conceptual impact of each major form. The curt or pointed style of Francis Bacon, so well-known for its three-part serials, also contains a striking number of balances, as we have seen in the selections from “Of Studies,” where the drumlike beat of three-part serial constructions is counterpointed and possibly foregrounded even more by balances. Between Bacon's opening claim, that “[s]tudies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability,” and his summing up, “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man,” we find “expert men” balanced against “those that are learned”; the chiasmic claim that studies “perfect nature, and are perfected by experience”; and two-beat pairs such as “execute, and perhaps judge,” “without them and above them,” “contradict and confute,” “believe and take for granted,” “weigh and consider,” and “chewed and digested.” On the other hand, the fabled balances of Dr. Johnson and of another writer known for his balances, Thomas Babington Macaulay, regularly employ three-part serials. So what happens when these forms play off each other?

Pinball Magic: When Double and Triple Rhythms Collide

Earlier in this chapter I gave a brief overview of Winston Weathers's attempt to theorize the rhetorical affect and impact of two- and three-part serial constructions. Weathers suggests that the two-part series, which we have been calling balance or balanced form, has connotations of authority and expertise, if not of authoritarianism. In contrast, the three-part series, according to Weathers, has connotations of the reasonable, the believable, and even the logical. I did not elaborate what Weathers has to say about serial constructions of four or more parts, which he sees as suggesting “the human, emotional, diffuse, and inexplicable,” because while these longer constructions clearly invoke the affective power of parallelism, I'm not sure readers can really process in any meaningful way four or more sound patterns or conceptual units without simply thinking of them as a list. A test example might be James Baldwin's sentence from
Notes of a Native Son
, in which he describes the aftermath of throwing a glass at a waitress in an all-white restaurant:

And, with that sound, my frozen blood abruptly thawed, I returned from wherever I had been, I saw, for the first time, the restaurant, the people with their mouths open, already, as it seemed to me, rising as one man, and I realized what I had done, and where I was, and I was frightened.

To my ear, the balances and serials in this sentence are so numerous they simply run together, canceling each other out. The sentence seems to inventory Baldwin's reactions, evoking an impression of “the human, emotional, diffuse, and inexplicable” impact of the four- (or more) part series. However, the ties among kinds of serial constructions are quite complex.

Weathers published his “Rhetoric of the Series” essay in
College Composition and Communication
in 1966, offering it as a prolegomenon to the rigorous study of serial constructions. While this essay has been subsequently reprinted in stylistic studies such as Glen Love and Michael Payne's important
Contemporary Essays on Style: Rhetoric, Linguistics, and Criticism
(1969)—and you have to be fond of an anthology you can refer to as the “love and pain” anthology—I'm not aware of any critical efforts to accept the challenge of the Weathers prolegomenon and to extend his study of the series. That's a shame, because I think two- and three-beat constructions may reveal something quite important about the relationship between our writing syntax and our understanding of the world, and even if I'm wrong about that, it's a shame because the interplay of two- and three-part beats and constructions in writing is so prominent that no serious writer can afford not to give these patterns some serious thought.

While the following examples of the interplay of balance and series are more over-the-top than sentences I would write for purposes other than this illustration, they do suggest a few of the basic patterns for combining these forms or rhythms.

Bruised, bleeding, and exhausted, the boxer stumbled back to his corner at the end of the fifth round, desperately in need of attention to the cut over his left eye, desperately in need of the encouragement of his trainer, and desperately in need of the unlikely arrival of a miracle.

As excited as I was nervous, as hopeful as I was hapless, as thankful for the opportunity as I was aware of the odds against me, I walked into the interview.

The more imaginative and inspired the instructor, the more inspiring and effective will be her instruction, the longer lasting her impact and the more grateful her students.

A walking, talking caricature of the inept politician, the silver-haired and silky-voiced senator was a functionary whose legislative proposals were rarely functional, a would-be backroom operator whose attempts at being effective usually turned out to be spectacularly ineffectual, a cut-rate visionary whose initiatives consistently failed to initiate significant change.

Prefabricated Rhythmic Sound Bites

These rhythms are powerful—almost hypnotic—but it seems to me that whenever balance and serial constructions collide, our ears and minds privilege the rhythm of twos over the rhythm of threes. Both rhythms call to us in an almost visceral way. I have previously discussed prefab phatic phrases such as “after all” or “in a way” or “of course” that act as syntactic speed bumps in sentences, slowing them down and drawing them out. Now I want to mention a very different kind of phatic prefab construction—call it the mini-balance—that, if anything, may serve to speed a sentence up and obviously tickle the ear. Moreover, these prefab phrases so intensely invoke balanced rhythm that they accentuate any other balances that may have been constructed within or between sentences. I'm thinking of an amazing number of phrases that remind us just how prevalent balanced rhythm is in our speech and in our writing. Here's just a small sample of these phrases.

namby-​­pamby

flip-​­flop

meet and greet

surf and turf

hurly-​­burly

teenie-​­weenie

wear and tear

thrills and chills

lean and mean

shilly-​­shally

rise and fall

topsy-​­turvy

slippy-​­slidey

eager-​­beaver

fixer-​­upper

oopsy-​­daisy

dipsy-​­doodle

helter-​­skelter

moldy-​­oldie

hip-​­hop

herky-​­jerky

razzle-​­dazzle

hotsy-​­totsy

rough and tough

rough and tumble

wild and woolly

bump and grind

boom and bust

whipper-​­snapper

splish-​­splash

super-​­saver

daily-​­double

wheeler-​­dealer

wishy-​­washy

flim-​­flam

town and gown

ooey gooey

itsy-​­bitsy

doom and gloom

tit for tat

rough and ready

ticky-​­tacky

ebb and flow

near and dear

harum-​­scarum

super-​­duper

pooper-​­scooper

hour of power

rinky-​­dink

And, to represent the end of the alphabet—zigzag.