Building Great Sentences (22 page)

I could go on and on—we have a million zillion of these prefab mini-balances, and once you start thinking of them, it's hard to stop. These mini-balances can themselves be used to create the collision of two- and three-beat rhythms, as in the sentence “Tall and tan, lean and mean, rested and ready, the mercenaries restlessly awaited their next mission, fit and itching for a fight, feared for their ferocity, armored by their amorality”—but such a sentence has a certain unfortunate, dare I say it, singsong quality.

My purpose in calling attention to these phrases is to suggest that balance is not an artificially constructed or carefully architected rhetorical phenomenon. Balance speaks to something far more basic and vigorous in our lives. Binary oppositions such as up/down, in/out, good/bad, day/night, hot/cold, happy/sad, young/old, rich/poor, and sweet/salty regularly divide the world of our experience into twos, and we build from these basic binaries ever larger balanced explanations of the way things are—“it's not the heat, it's the humidity,” “what goes around comes around,” “what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”—until we find ourselves more and more assenting to philosophies reduced to balanced forms: “if you can't walk the walk, don't talk the talk,” “no taxation without representation.” Indeed, it seems likely to me that our binging on balance has a visceral antecedent in the bilateral symmetry of our bodies, the inhalation and exhalation of our life breath, the lub-dub rhythm of the human heart. Connotations of certainty and authority? You bet, because balance has to do with the very rhythms that keep us going.

From the Power of Twos to the Power of Threes

Then what of the power of three? How do we account for the almost irresistible impulse to make our tales about not one, not two, but three little pigs, three blind mice? Why must the genie grant us three wishes, why must the argument rest on three contentions, why do we get three strikes before we're out? Against binaries such as past and present, the three-part series reminds us to expand our view to consider the future. When we consider the age-old dichotomy of mind and body, the three-part serial reminds us to add soul, and so on. A syllogism consists of three parts: major premise, minor premise, and conclusion, and for the rhetorician the three appeals are to pathos, ethos, and logos; the color wheel suggests that all colors come from the basic trio of red, yellow, and blue; matter divides into solid, liquid, and gas; that basic building block of matter, the atom, is made up of electron, neutron, and proton. Three dimensions, a calendar divided into days, months, and years; a school system divided into elementary, middle, and high schools; our food divided into carbohydrates, proteins, and fats—all these are the three-part constructions we have chosen to make sense of our world. So is the appeal of three-part serial constructions really much of a mystery? These artificial rhythms of rhetoric merely extend the central organizing constructs of human consciousness into language.

Walt Whitman knew what he was talking about when he claimed of his poetry that it was singing the body electric. We should do no less in our prose. Balance one three-part series against another or construct a three-part series of balanced forms and the sentence can become a pinball machine of sounds, rhythms, images, and ideas. I can't think of any modern writer who does a better job of constructing verbal pinball machines than William Gass, whose penchant for balanced forms I mentioned in the last chapter. Gass is the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, where for many years he taught philosophy and English. More important, he is one of America's most celebrated writers and critics, and among prose stylists who have thought long and hard about prose, he has no equal.

William Gass, Contemporary Prose Master

There is no other writer in America who combines Gass's stylistic verve and panache with his philosophical rigor. Nor is there any writer in America who has devoted more serious thought to language, to writing, and, most important for our purposes, to the sentence. Gass has famously claimed that “Gertrude Stein did more with sentences, and understood them better, than any writer ever has.” But this is one of the only areas I can think of where William Gass is flat-out wrong, since his contemplation of the sentence builds on and easily surpasses Stein's. Indeed, his essay “The Ontology of the Sentence, or How to Make a World of Words,” is the wisest and most useful contemplation of the sentence that we have. Here's a sample of Gass as he's just getting warmed up to his subject in an essay called “The Music of Prose”:

For prose has a pace; it is dotted with stops and pauses, frequent rests; inflections rise and fall like a low range of hills; certain tones are prolonged; there are patterns of stress and harmonious measures; there is a proper method of pronunciation, even if it is rarely observed; alliteration will trouble the tongue, consonance ease its sounds out, so that any mouth making that music will feel its performance even to the back of the teeth and to the glottal's stop; mellifluousness is not impossible, and harshness is easy; drum roll and clangor can be confidently called for—lisp, slur, and growl; so there will be a syllabic beat in imitation of the heart, while rhyme will recall a word we passed perhaps too indifferently; vowels will open and consonants close like blooming plants; repetitive schemes will act as refrains, and there will be phrases—little motifs—to return to, like the tonic; clauses will be balanced by other clauses the way a waiter carries trays; parallel lines will nevertheless meet in their common subject; clots of concepts will dissolve and then recombine, so we shall find endless variations on the same theme; a central idea, along with its many modifications, like soloist and chorus, will take their turns until, suddenly, all sing at once the same sound.

Of course, that's one marvelous single sentence.

Here is Gass's exultant reminder from
On Being Blue
that sentences
do things
, they are alive, are closely tied to the body's basic rhythms, and, when in the hands of a masterful writer, can be taught steps that dance across the lips and across the page:

So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelais was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through “a-n-d” as it opens—there—there—we're here! . . . in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified; not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech . . . ah!

Whew! That's the most exciting and the most excited sentence I know, its counterpointed rhythms, rhymes, and alliterations rising to a climax that is sensual, if not sexual, its very being a refutation to the prose prudes who claim that overly designed and structured sentences are artificial and unnatural, its orgasmic progression a celebration of language that lives, that is as organic and natural as nature itself. His writing magnificently voices the uncharted power a writer can tap when combining duple and triple rhythms, the sounds and sense of two- and three-part serials. Gass presents his celebrations of sound and syntax in support of claims about the subject matter of his sentences; but for Gass, as for Gertrude Stein before him, his sentences themselves are always part of the point of his writing, if not the main point. Gass
always
sees language as a subject every bit as interesting and important as the referential world his language points to, invokes, or stands for. For Gass, the instance of his discourse is always center stage, his writing always about writing just as surely as it is about the people, the prose, or whatever phenomena it seems to put forward as his subjects. His writing always reminds us that our sentences can be a source of pleasure just as surely as they are a means for advancing propositions.

Of all the wisdom I find in Gass's electric prose, what impresses me most is that his syntactical showing off, the unexpected metaphors and sometime silly similes, the obvious attention he lavishes on every word—all always remind us that words matter, that sentences matter, that there is nothing artificial in artifice. As he observes in his essay “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence”:

Words are therefore weapons like the jaws of the crocodile or the claws of the cat. We use them to hold our thought as we hold a bone; we use them to communicate with the pack, dupe our enemies, manipulate our friends; we use them to club the living into food.

That's a jarringly aggressive and violent view of language, but it reminds us of the power our sentences can have. Our responsibility as thoughtful writers is to channel and direct both power and playfulness to the purposes we choose. Whether we're wielding our words like swords or sparklers, we must understand their power to enlighten, frighten, amuse, betray, evoke nearly any emotional experience, or render the unfathomable a reality. Not bad for some marks on a page.

Next Steps

If you didn't see this exercise coming, your eyes were closed. Of course I want you to craft ten sentences, each featuring some significant serial construction, a sign that you get the power of threes, a celebration of the many forms serial constructions can take, an illustration of the ways in which we can embed a serial construction within a sentence or turn the sentence itself into a three-part series, of the ways in which we can put the “reasonable” or “logical” or “truly representative” aura of the three-part series to most effective use. And, of course, I want your ten sentences to illustrate a variety of serial patterns, not relying solely on any single pattern as I have done in these instructions.

Then, after crafting those ten sentences, you should turn your attention to crafting three more sentences illustrating the rhetorical trope of anaphora, three more illustrating the rhetorical trope of epistrophe, and three more illustrating the trope of symploce.

Finally, to fill out the exercise to a cool twenty serially driven sentences, craft one fairly extended sentence in which you employ the rhetorical trope of polysyndeton to achieve a desired effect.

Long Sentences and Master Sentences

I
n the summer of 1978, my wife and I were driving through the British countryside in Wiltshire when we topped a small hill and suddenly, there before us in all its enigmatic glory, under what I rightly or wrongly remember as a brooding sky, was Stonehenge. No one is completely certain of the original purpose this massive architectural wonder served. However, one glimpse of the circular design of those giant stone slabs and most of us would instantly agree with the understated comment on one British history website that “[o]nly something very important to the ancients would have been worth the effort and investment that it took to construct Stonehenge.”

I feel much the same way about the massive, monumental, and enigmatic super sentences I sometimes unexpectedly come across in my reading. Their construction may not be quite the equal of the engineering feat that produced Stonehenge, but in its own way it can be striking.

This chapter will examine sentences that scream for our attention by virtue of their excessiveness. Very long sentences or sentences that function in remarkable ways might be called master sentences, a nod at once to their originality and to their control. These linguistic and syntactic Stonehenges call attention to their mastery in more different ways than I or anyone else could enumerate, much less prescribe. However, while no formula can anticipate the context and purpose that call forth a master sentence, an effective one can only be constructed by combining a number of the syntactic moves that have so far been the subject of our discussions.

Long Does Not Always Mean Masterful, but Most Master Sentences Are Long

Not all master sentences are long, but most are. On the other hand, most really long sentences are
not
master sentences. Google “long sentences” and you get some fascinating results. Weed out the websites that refer to long sentences of the prison term, time-behind-bars type, and there must still be over a half million web pages that focus on long sentences in writing, almost all of which share the general view that long sentences are bad. Indeed, many are, but the point these zillions of web pages obscure is that while many long sentences are bad, it's usually the case that bad sentences are long, or to put this another way, what's usually bad about a long sentence is not its length, but its logic or lack thereof.

There are competing claims of what is the longest sentence in English. Suffice it to say there are lots of competitors, many of them obvious run-ons and comma splices. One website claims that Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom!
contains the longest
properly punctuated sentence
, a whopper of 1,287 words, and that may well be true, although something tells me that a sentence one thousand words long has stopped being a sentence and has become something we don't have a word for. It comes as no surprise that this website is the official voice of something called the Plain English Campaign, which confidently advises writers: “You should always try to avoid long sentences.”

Another web page devoted to overly long sentences tells us, “A recommended sentence length is anywhere from 17 to 24 words,” and assures us that sentences of over forty words are generally ineffective. There's even a poem titled “The Very Long Sentence,” which rambles on for some 412 words. Clearly something about long sentences seems to catch our attention, and it's equally clear that writers are being warned to avoid them, but that advice doesn't make sense. In the first place, sentence length is simply not a very useful index to style. The length of a sentence doesn't take into account the relative complexity or sophistication, or even the length, of the words that make up that sentence. Additionally, vocabulary choice could make a huge difference in the sentence's readability or effectiveness.

Variety Is Not Just the Spice of Life! Vary Your Sentence Length

Writers should vary the length of their sentences, avoiding long strings of short sentences, just as surely as they might want to avoid long strings of long sentences.

And if variety of sentence length is important, we need to know how to write effective long sentences so we can throw them in and mix them up with all those short sentences. Let's forget that bit of hoo-ha that says that a sentence of over forty words is generally ineffective. I don't know who came up with that magic number and I can't begin to imagine how it was arrived at, but I can tell you that this advice is completely arbitrary, way too simplistic, and it actually discourages some of the skills an effective writer needs to develop.

I'm with Ursula K. Le Guin when it comes to the subject of long sentences. Le Guin, herself one of our finest writers, devotes an entire chapter to sentence length and complexity in her fine and wonderfully titled creative writing guidebook,
Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew
. Celebrating the glories of long and complicated sentences, Le Guin writes: “Teachers trying to get school kids to write clearly, and journalists with their weird rules of writing, have filled a lot of heads with the notion that the only good sentence is a short sentence. This is true for convicted criminals.” She goes on to deflate the myth that short-sentence prose is more like the way we speak, and concludes: “To avoid long sentences and the marvelously supple connections of a complex syntax is to deprive your prose of an essential quality.”

Now that I've made several strong claims about sentence length, let me offer a few examples to support those claims. Ask anyone who has read much Hemingway whether his sentences are characteristically long or characteristically short, and the odds are they'll choose short. Indeed, Hemingway has become something of the poster child for short sentences, but consider this sentence from
Death in the Afternoon
:

Once I remember Gertrude Stein talking of bullfights spoke of her admiration for Joselito and showed me some pictures of him in the ring and of herself and Alice Toklas sitting in the first row of the wooden barreras at the bull ring at Valencia with Joselito and his brother Gallo below, and I had just come from the Near East, where the Greeks broke the legs of their baggage and transport animals and drove and shoved them off the quay into the shallow water when they abandoned the city of Smyrna, and I remember saying that I did not like the bullfights because of the poor horses.

For any of you who were counting, that's 108 words. And here's another celebrated Hemingway sentence, also from
Death in the Afternoon
, that leaves that supposed upper limit of forty words in the rearview mirror.

So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these moral standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very moral to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but very fine.

Those Hemingway sentences were clearly written under the influence of Gertrude Stein, but here's one we've seen before that is pure action:

George was coming down in the telemark position, kneeling, one leg forward and bent, the other trailing, his sticks hanging like some insect's thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow, and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow.

My point is simply that Hemingway wrote tons of long sentences. It's just that most of them aren't particularly memorable. Indeed, it may be precisely those long unmemorable sentences he wrote that make us remember the short ones. Similarly, William Faulkner wrote tons of short sentences, but it's the long ones we tend to remember. What matters most in the case of both writers is not the length of their sentences, but the ways in which they made their sentences long. For instance, there's almost a sense of exhilarating speed and ease to that Hemingway sentence about skiing for the simple reason that it relies exclusively on free modifying phrases that seem to race downhill after a short base clause. This great example of cumulative syntax is seventy-four words long, but I doubt that anyone on hearing it or on reading it would think of this as a long sentence. This is a fast sentence.

How Long Sentences Go Bad (and How to Make Them Good Again)

What has given long sentences such a bad rap is not their length, but their overreliance on bound modifiers rather than on the free modifiers Hemingway used so very effectively. Virginia Tufte calls attention to this problem in her fine study
Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style
. She offers the example of a sentence that relies too heavily on bound modifiers in prepositional phrases and in long noun phrases.

Here we go:

Neglect of this rich mine of information is due in part to the difficulty one faces in attempting to establish a suitable model in this area for modern quantification techniques that have contributed immeasurably to the formulation of historic generalizations in such areas as economic history and voting patterns.

My eyes glaze over. My ears glaze over. Later, Tufte gives us two more examples of the unfortunate results of relying on bound modifiers to advance the propositional content of a sentence.

Here we go again:

The control of these fundamental protective systems and the channeling of them into team play and individual effort that possess logic and reason acceptable to the individual's culture represent the mental hygiene of athletic endeavor.

Here's another:

It is encouraging to note the progress made by beekeeping to meet the challenging times, particularly in connection with the difficult problem of pesticides as they relate to the keeping of bees in the highly cultivated areas where bees are needed for pollination.

Admittedly, this sentence lacks the clear action and time focus of the Hemingway sentence, as it advances an idea rather than action, but it makes that idea almost painful to think about. These sentences are bad mostly because of what goes into them, not because of how much there is. Part of the problem is that when we try to figure out the base clause at the heart of each, we find that the subject of the sentence is not a single word or two, but a lengthy noun phrase containing numerous propositions. For instance, the subject of that sentence about athletic injuries is the noun phrase “the control of these fundamental protective systems and the channeling of them into team play and individual effort that possess logic and reason acceptable to the individual's culture.” This means that of that thirty-five-word sentence—I know, it seemed like more, didn't it?—its subject required twenty-eight words. When a subject takes twenty-eight words, what's left for a predicate to do?

Sentences so clotted up by bound modifiers with embedded prepositional phrases and relative clauses are really beyond help. These are sentences not even a mother could love, and the only real way to improve them is to start over, determining a relatively short base clause at the heart of each, and then finding ways to expand that base clause with modifying phrases. Nevertheless, we can make them a little easier to read by trying to rethink them as a short sentence, followed by modifying information. Here's how we might rewrite that sentence about athletics:

(1) This is the mental hygiene of athletic endeavor,

(2) controlling these fundamental protective systems,

(2) channeling them into team play and individual effort,

(3) both possessing logic,

(3) both acceptable to the individual's culture.

And that sentence about beekeeping might be recast to read:

(1) Beekeeping is making encouraging progress,

(2) responding to challenging times,

(2) facing challenges such as the difficult problem of pesticides,

(3) the problem being to keep bees in the highly cultivated areas where bees are needed for pollination.

I've diagrammed the revisions to indicate the logical steps they now take. These steps are more signs of logical progression than of unfolding actions in a sequence, but they remind us that a sentence can give us a sense of movement even when it is not describing motion. In fact, that's what's wrong with the original versions—they have no sense of movement. You can't tell when the sentence is taking a step. In fact, those original sentences are so cramped up they don't seem to take any steps at all.

Mastering Sentences

So, having seen that the length of a sentence is not in itself a sign of writing strength or weakness, let's consider some sentences that are quite long but are master sentences not because of their length but due to their mastery.

In her essay “Inviting the Muses,” poet, essayist, and noted writing teacher Marguerite Young describes one of the first exercises she assigns in her writing classes, a requirement that her students compose a sentence of at least three pages long. She further specifies that this monster sentence should not be monstrous, since it should also be grammatically logical, pleasingly rhythmical, and closely documented, by which I believe she means precise. Noting that these requirements compel the writer to put into the sentence exactly the things that are usually absent from short sentences, Young terms the result a “dragnet sentence,” since it hauls into the sentence everything the writer's net catches, and she explains its value this way:

Surely, also, anyone who can master the architectonics of a long sentence learns what its validities and uses are—and can master a short sentence thereafter—has learned also the beauties of variation—has learned something of the oceanic swells, pearly combers breaking upon the shores of consciousness—his own and the reader's—ripplings, ebbings, whispers of ghostly surf, reverberations which should go on in many consciousnesses forever afterward and in the unconscious life of man. For literature is that which is memorable.