HOW TO WRITE A GOOD SENTENCE: A Manual for Writers Who Know How to Write Correct Sentences by Arnold G. Nelson

FICTION AND NONFICTION

When I first thought of writing this manual, the title that occurred to me was “Some Decent Sentences.” I liked that idea because it made a little fun of some of my colleagues in the English Department where I was teaching who complained about their student’s ignorance. The most offensive remarks sounded like this: “Why do we have to waste our time trying to teach these morons who can’t even write a decent sentence?” The cynicism and stupidity of such a remark tempted me once to respond, “Why don’t you quit and write pornographic novels?”

The word “decent” is a trap. A decent sentence to my colleagues meant a sentence with no misspelled words, grammatical errors or faulty punctuation. I thought my title would be ironic enough to jar the sensibilities of some of my colleagues. But it was an inside joke, and I found something better. A “good sentence” is something any reader knows is clear, has the force of an impelling thought, and may even be memorable.

This manual has several dozen sentences chosen as examples. They are better than correct; they are exemplary, or well crafted, or artistic, or beautiful. Their creators have pondered the wealth of possibilities the language offers and have written good sentences.

Philip Roth is a productive American novelist. His novels have entered the shelves of the Library of American Literature together with the works of Henry James, Mark Twain, Faulkner, and Melville, and have enriched our literary experience with thousands of exemplary sentences. He is a classic American novelist. Here is one of his sentences. I call it the sexual sentence.

We had imagined it beforehand in all its possibilities, dreamed it all out loud for many, many months now, and yet I am dumbstruck at the sight of The Monkey’s middle finger disappearing up into Lina’s cunt. (Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, Library of American Literature)

To understand the image that this sentence points to as it proceeds, the reader must know that The Monkey is Portnoy’s mistress, a sophisticated model from the lower classes and Lina is a whore, whom “we” have invited to take part in a ménage a trois in a Roman hotel room. The Monkey had extended the invitation. In the previous sentence Roth sets the image up: The Monkey “puts her hand between the whore’s legs.” The word “it” teases us into the sentence twice, first in an abstract predication and then as a sensual (poetic?) process “dreamed it all out loud”. The image is projected in a complete first-person singular predication by the narrator Portnoy. Each word expresses the horny features of Portnoy’s image: “dumbstruck” (no words are adequate), the “sight” (visionary), The Monkey’s middle finger (all the implications of “up yours”), “disappearing” (to what end?) “up into” (Portnoy’s technical expertise) “cunt” in the orgasmic final position of the full cadence of the last phrase in a well-crafted sentence. (In typing the sentence just now, I learned that the Old English word “cunt” is flagged with red dots by my word processor’s spell-check, the only word of George Carlin’s list of seven prohibited words so handled. I’m sure I spelled it right.) I hope I’ve convinced you that Roth’s sentence is well-crafted, maybe even beautiful.

I’ve chosen only a very few sentences from fiction for this book. Sentences in fiction are too hard. I get that word from my daughter Linnea, who said it when my friend John Freund asked how she liked the movie “The Ox-Bow Incident,” which she had just seen in her seventh-grade English class. “It was hard,” she said.

I’m ninety-one years old; I don’t have time to do the job right; I’d have to have gone into Portnoy’s whole personality, his Jewish heritage (different from that of the goyim, the gentiles, like The Monkey), his parent’s influence on him (his father’s debilitating constipation, the prunes and the suppositories, and his mother’s always referring to his manly schlong in baby talk as the “little thing”), his job as a lawyer appointed by Mayor Lindsay as Assistant Commissioner for the City of New York Commission on Human Opportunity. In a complete analysis of Roth’s sentence I would certainly have to have observed that the entire book is supposedly Portnoy’s monologue as he speaks from the couch of his psychiatrist, Herr Doktor Spielvogel.

The big difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction distinguishes between a narrator and the author, between Portnoy and Roth. When Roth writes an essay, the reader holds him personally responsible for every thought expressed; it comes from his mind, his whole personality, his self, his identity. When Roth writes a novel he invents a narrator. If the narrator writes, I did this to her and she did that to me, the author has created a personality within the novel’s action. The narrator is an extremely complex actor in the novel, a rich personality. But even if the novelist writes in the third person, he has invented a narrator, one the reader can’t see. The author has invented the narrator’s voice, his style, his moral stand, even his politics. But he is inactive in the novel. The novelist can (and often does) say, This is not me, it’s fiction. We’re getting to a sticky point. Isn’t the novelist responsible for the morals and politics of what he has written? Of course. Maybe he wanted his first- or third-person narrator to present the moral or political stand the reader gets. Maybe every novel unavoidably does that. Well, leave out the maybe.

Let’s go to a classic first-person novel that has become controversial because of one word the narrator says. Huck says, “Nigger.” My spell-check allows that. But I’d rather analyze what I think is the best sentence in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When the novel was published, it was banned in the public library of Concord, Massachusetts, not because Huck says Nigger but because he doesn’t speak correct English; his speech is “inelegant,” “immoral,” “rough,” “ignorant” and so on. (New York Herald, March 18, 1885) The only epithet the library board left out was “racist.” That was a twentieth-century problem; the word Nigger has banned the book any number of times since political correction became sort of vogue. I’ll be politically correct and choose this beautiful first-person sentence that has no dirty or politically incorrect words:

Well, when Tom and me got to the edge of the hilltop, we looked away down into the village and could see three or four lights twinkling where there was sick folks, maybe, and the stars over us was sparkling ever so fine and down by the village was the river, a whole mile broad and awful still and grand. (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884)

Four gross grammatical errors in one sentence does not a literary masterpiece make. Vernacular style, Mark Twain’s triumph in his novel, is the narrator’s powerful voice. This sentence fuses vulgarisms, the colloquial mode, realistic description, loose structure, and “high toned” language to describe a scene, evoke a mood, and mostly to characterize the narrator, the boy Huck Finn. “Well” establishes the colloquial mode, vulgarisms and the loose structure of Huck’s speech carries it through. The loose structure of the sentence, both subordinate and coordinate elements added on as Huck speaks, lets the reader share Huck’s perceptions in sequence. Mark Twain loved the river and wants us to see it the way he does. The same goes for Huck. Huck’s language isn’t always vulgar. He says Tom and me, not me and Tom, obeying school-teacher logic for correct, polite writing: always put yourself last in such cases. Mark Twain thought the incorrect “me” was enough vulgarity for his purposes. Huck and Tom look “away down” into the village, Huck’s neat confounding of “way” and “away” flavoring the perception. Then he looks very carefully and counts “three or four lights” – not some lights or a few lights. Both Huck and Mark Twain are realists; they specify as nearly as possible exactly what Huck sees. He sees in one image both pleasant twinkling and human frailty – “sick folks, maybe.” Huck sees the entire scene: man and nature are joined in the echoing image of sparkling stars.

Twinkling lanterns and sparkling stars are ingenious parallels as well as symbols for the contrast between “sick folks” and “ever so fine.” Huck is a boy whose perceptions are finely tuned by compassion and aesthetic appreciation in the same moment. The beauty of the cosmos demands a vocabulary beyond his everyday talk. He borrows from Tom Sawyer’s “high toned” books the words “fine” and “still” and “grand” to convey his sensitivity to beauty. “Awful” is his everyday adjective/adverb for exceedingly.

“Where there was sick folks, maybe” is the most telling perception in the book. The section preceding describes Jim’s weird superstitions, and it is followed by Tom Sawyer’s teaching his gang how to play a proper adventure according to the book. Between these passages of the unreal worlds of Tom’s innocence and Jim’s ignorance, Huck is his own man; he sees life truly. If Huckleberry Finn is a humorous book – and one may have serious doubts about that – the humor is heightened by Mark Twain’s and Huck’s tragic view of life.

You will notice that in my analysis of this sentence of fiction, I had to go to other parts of the novel to make points and that I should have gone still further into it to do the job right. I make no mention of Huck’s father or the two con men or Aunt Polly or Huck’s failed attempt to play a girl or the murder of a man on a public street. If this beautiful sentence is derived from Huck Finn’s tragic view of life I should have constructed the necessary links to the rest of the novel. Like my analysis of the sentence from Portnoy’s story, it fails to recognize the tangled web of fiction. Nonfiction has a web to be sure, but it’s not so tangled. So let’s analyze the makings of a descriptive sentence from another nineteenth-century classic, but which is not fiction.

After this, came shaving and combing and brushing; and when, having spent the first part of the day in this way we sat down in the forecastle, in the afternoon, with clean duck trousers and shirts on, washed, shaved, and combed, and looking a dozen shades lighter for it, reading, sewing, and talking at our ease, with a clear sky and warm sun over our heads, a steady breeze over the starboard quarter, studding sails out alow and aloft and all the flying kites abroad – we felt that we had got back into the pleasantest part of a sailor’s life. (Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 1840)

A pretty long sentence, perfectly appropriate to its purpose. It comes from Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. It was published when Dana was twenty-five years old. It was the first detailed description of life aboard a seagoing vessel written from the viewpoint of a seaman. “Viewpoint of a seaman” is sufficient identification of the narrator, a real person in a nonfictional work. Dana kept a full journal of the trip, feeling a moral obligation to tell it all, especially the life of the common seaman serving under a sadistic captain. The episodes of cruelty and daily life of hardship and danger are heightened in Dana’s record when he contrasts them with moments of serenity and pleasure in sentences like this one.

Every word in the sentence, ninety of them, add up to the main point in the bottom line: the pleasantest part of a sailor’s life. If an editor at Reader’s Digest tried to delete even one word, there would be serious loss of flavor in the sentence. The first part of the fairly lengthy paragraph shows the preparation the sailors made: the Sunday cleanup of their quarters and their bodies after a month of dirt accumulation – clearing out the forecastle, scrubbing and scraping the floor, drying and airing their bedding, washing and drying their filthy clothes, having a “freshwater wash” or bath with the sailors soaping and scrubbing, and dousing one another with buckets of water. At that point our sentence begins.

It describes a scene rather than an action, a still inserted into an adventure movie. The camera focuses on every aspect – the clean and refreshed sailors at center stage, enjoying their own company and the pleasant day and beautiful ship. With all our senses alerted, we share the pleasantest part of a sailor’s life. The sailor’s vocabulary is important to give the scene its flavor. The reader doesn’t have to know the vocabulary of the sea, exactly what the forecastle, the larboard quarter, the studding sails, and the flying kites are in order to share the feeling of the scene. (Of course, the experienced sailor reading it would know that the flying kites are abroad only in fair weather.) Dana was not parading his vocabulary inappropriately; he was using every means to convey the ambience of the scene at that moment. It took some doing for Dana to get it all into his one sentence: “When . . . we sat down in the forecastle” . . . (The cargo of ambience, fifty-eight words, come here) . . . “we felt that we had got back into the pleasantest part of a sailor’s life.” Without laboring the matter, I should point out that all the details have an appropriate and logical order, each part subordinated and coordinated properly with the other parts. All the spars and running lines are in order, and the sentence sails. The writer/narrator Dana is as meticulous with the sentence as if he were carving scrimshaw. I didn’t feel it necessary in order to appreciate his artistry to link the sentence with the rest of the book, with details of the captain’s cruelty or the crew’s responses or the interesting life they found in San Francisco. If the sentence were taken from a novel, I would have to have done just that. Why doesn’t he tell how the sailors felt about their nakedness as they bathed together? Why doesn’t he tell us what they were reading? What wonderful opportunities for fictional irony! Dana would have to say, “I’m not imagining this, it’s me, it’s nonfiction.” I hope you know now why most of my sentences are from nonfiction.

WHAT IS A SENTENCE?

My teacher knew exactly. Evelyn Kottke in the sixth grade in Lincoln School in Stillwater, Minnesota, in 1930. Miss Kottke (None of my female teachers were married; against the rules.) taught us that a sentence was a complete thought. And she taught us how to make diagrams of complete thoughts right there on the blackboard. Most important, she taught us the names of all the parts of complete thoughts. The Huck Finn types in the class didn’t do so well. What good is this here junk? But I was a dutiful Tom Sawyer type and diagrammed with a flourish. I could rattle off the parts of speech and the helping verbs and the negatives like anything. When I taught English linguistics as a college professor I loved to take a deep breath and recite the helping verbs; they sounded like one long word. Be-am-is-are-was-were-been-have-has-had-do-did-does-may-can-shall-will-must-might-could-would-should. After the applause, I would tell them to forget that junk; we were going to learn about trees not diagrams, morphemes not lists of words. My mentor was Noam Chomsky, not Evelyn Kottke. We would ponder sentences like “Green ideas sleep furiously,” not “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” Do you think the Huck Finn types would have sat still parsing sentences? Page after page of “Time is a noun used as the subject of the verb in the nominative case.” Looking at those two sentences now, I do believe that Chomsky’s sentence is fiction and Miss Kottke’s is nonfiction. I sure would have a hard time now with green ideas. It was Miss Kottke who mentored me in the nonfiction narratives of classical Greek history. She drilled us furiously on the Greek battles and some of the Greek heroes. I’ll never forget Miltiades and Phidipedes and the Battles of Marathon and Salamis and the date 490 B.C.. I knew that Aristotle was close to that period and that helped me in my oral exam for the Masters Degree at the University of Minnesota when Professor Hornberger asked me when Aristotle lived. Thank you, Miss Kottke. But why didn’t you enlighten me a little about Greek mythology? Was it too hard? I guess she just wasn’t into fiction.

Now I like the idea that a sentence is a complete thought. But when I was teaching, that idea was anathema among my colleagues, so I didn’t teach it. When I began teaching the English linguistics course in the 1950s, it was proper to tell the students that a sentence had a certain vocal shape, that the human voice in speech has variations in pitch: the voice goes from low to high in regular patterns that conform to the speaker’s meanings. A certain combination of pitch, stress (loudness) and pause signal the end of a sentence. The “structural linguists” at places like the University of Texas and Indiana University called this combination “an independent terminal juncture group” and when it was followed by silence, a sentence had been spoken. There were several other phonetic complications that were beyond me because I was a self-taught “linguist” with no guidance in how to hear sounds the way Professor Higgins could in “Pygmalion.” But a revolution occurred in 1957 with the publication of Noam Chomsky’s first book, Syntactic Structures. To be up to date, we had to teach “transformational grammar.” That suited me fine because I could handle the “trees” (they made more sense than diagrams) and I loved the morphemes that constituted the auxiliary part of the verb phrase: aux = t + (m) + (have + en) + (be + ing). The equals sign should be an arrow. That’s the way the experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did it and I liked the mathematical look of it. T means tense, and M means modal. Very neat. It explains that stupid list of helping verbs that doesn’t distinguish the crucial difference between the T’s and the M’s. We called the exemplary, archetypical, root sentences “kernels.” Supposedly they underlay every actual sentence and the parenthetical elements in the kernel are optional. Tense is obligatory; every kernel has tense, of which there are only two in English, past and present. I realize this moment that being away from teaching for twenty-nine years, I’ve forgotten more of what I got from Chomsky fifty-two years ago than I have from what I got from Miss Kottke seventy-nine years ago. I couldn’t now teach a class about the nuances of grammaticality, deep structure, generative semantics, embedding, and all the rest of it. I even had to look up the formula for the auxiliary that I myself wrote. I wasn’t sure about it.

Again, what is a sentence? I’ll draw from all three systems of grammar I have lived through to arrive at a definition: Miss Kottke’s “prescriptive” grammar of complete thoughts, structural linguistics grammar of sounds converted into punctuation in writing, and Chomsky’s transformational grammar of deep structure. I’ll skip Chomsky’s matho-philosophical discussion, which I don’t understand, but I’ll cling to some of his basic assumptions for my discussion of good sentences. Transformations of sentences into questions, exclamations, indirect quotations, “there” sentences and “it” sentences, and many kinds of embeddings and modifications and subordinations – these changes in sentence structure remind the writer that he can choose from an infinite number of transformations as he writes a sentence. “Infinite” really means “no end of.” There is no possibility of writing the world’s longest sentence: you can always add another word to any sentence. Endless possibilities. Furthermore, you can add sentence structures inside sentence structures inside sentence structures inside, inside, inside . . . Grammar is recursive. A book about recursion I’ve tried to understand is Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I recommend it if you’re young enough to want to tighten your mind.

Since variety is often a quality that improves writing, making transformations is Chomsky’s contribution to the art of written style. Chomsky also revived the notion of the grammatical sentence. Chomsky wasn’t interested in reinforcing the grammatical purist’s fussing about who-whom and shall-will, but he made grammaticality a respectable and interesting concept by pointing out that “John is owning a house” and “Both of John’s parents are married to aunts of mine” are ungrammatical. (The second sentence would be OK now in states where same-sex marriage is legal.)

The definition of “sentence” for this manual derives from all three kinds of grammar I have lived through. A sentence is one of the infinitely variable expressions of the writer’s complete thought, punctuated into the code that translates the thought into written form. All of the example sentences I use here are good; some go beyond good and are artistic, poetic, and beautiful.

SYNTAX AND RHYTHM

Any sentence can be transformed into a different structure. This one, however seems unchangeable. As a matter of fact, this melodic sentence was created by Charles E. Weller as a slogan in Grant’s first campaign for President.

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.

One can easily come up with half a dozen different versions of a sentence. A writer polishing the thought he is constructing always keeps ringing changes on the sentence at hand. The opportunity to revise makes the difference between writing and speaking. One possible transformation is as follows: THE AID OF THE PARTY IS WHAT IT IS TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN TO COME TO NOW. Both “the aid of the party” and “now” are crucial elements in the sentence and deserve the emphatic prominence of initial and final position they have in the original and revised sentences. In the revision, however, they are reversed, conforming to the order of things in a kernel:

subject + verb + complement

This change required the use of a new element, the “what” clause, wordy and awkward. It also moved the object of the preposition “the aid of the party” away from the preposition “to” and resulted in the school-teacher’s bugaboo, ending the sentence (except for “now,” with a preposition). To conform with her rule, we can put “to” at the beginning – TO THE AID OF THE PARTY IS WHAT IT IS TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN TO COME NOW. This grammatically “correct” sentence is even more ludicrous than the first revision.

A more proper version would be: THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN TO COME TO THE AID OF THE PARTY IS NOW. “Now” has even more emphasis than before but “the time” robs “the aid of the party” of its proper emphasis; “time” is just an empty word required for grammatical logic.

How about making “come” the main verb instead of “is”? ALL GOOD MEN SHOULD COME TO THE AID OF THE PARTY NOW. This change gives the active verb “come” a more important spot, which as is often said should make the sentence stronger. This new main verb seems to require the strong modal “should” to retain the meaning of the original. This revision is hard to fault. It has an admirable directness, the result of conforming to the model structure of the English declarative sentence:

subject + verb + adverb

but the two adverb elements, an adverb and a prepositional phrase, give the sentence a completely different rhythm. The original sings, or dances. Charles E. Weller must have loved the tune, three melodious phrases, the final one made up of three smaller phrases and ending with the only two-syllable word in the sentence. It’s the rhythm that gives the original its character.

It should be clear why I chose this sentence to analyze. We accept its meaning without question. No doubt that the writer certifies its intention in the real world. It intends what it says. Beyond that, the sentence is artistic. Its rhythm raises it above the ordinary sentence. Poetic is not too strong a word.

Now I’d like to take a sentence that anyone would call poetic. It was written by America’s greatest poet, Emily Dickinson. I’m flabbergasted realizing that I have to classify it as nonfiction. Every word proclaims her identity. It’s part of a letter she wrote to a man she wanted to meet; she thought he might be her mentor: Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a writer and newspaper publisher. I have to assume you know that Emily Dickinson was a single woman, part of a distinguished family in Amherst, Massachusetts, a recluse, who spent almost all of her time in her upstairs room, reading, thinking, and somewhat secretly writing poems. After she died, the large volume of poems appeared and eventually were published, after considerable editing, revising, and puzzling over. She made the Library of American Literature.

I’ll quote the whole letter, which is in response to his earlier letter. The date is 1862, when Emily Dickinson, at the height of her power, wrote many of her greatest poems.

You think my gate “spasmodic” – I am in danger – Sir –

You think me “uncontrolled” – I have no Tribunal.

Would you have time to be the “friend” you should think I need? I have a little shape – it would not crowd your Desk – nor make much Racket as the Mouse, that dents your Galleries –

If I might bring you what I do – not so frequent to trouble you – and ask you if I told it clear – ‘twould be control to me –

The sailor cannot see the North – but knows the needle can –

The “hand you stretch me in the dark,” I put mine in, and turn away – I have no Saxon, now –

       As if I asked a common Alms,

       And in my wandering hand

       A stranger pressed a Kingdom,

       And I, bewildered, stand –

       As if I asked the Orient

       Had it for me a Morn

       And it should lift it’s purple Dikes,

       And shatter me with Dawn!

But will you be my Preceptor, Mr. Higginson?

When is Emily Dickinson writing nonfiction and when is she writing a poem? Every time she writes a line on her stationary or in her notebooks, the strong metrical note is iambic. It’s all poetry. Her punctuation in both letters and poems is primarily the seemingly casual dash, often used by many people in informal letters but, as scholars’ studies have revealed, not so casual in Dickinson. Any reading of her letters raises the same question I pose. Her poems are strictly metrical, like the one in her letter, iambic feet, three and four feet alternating:

ta-dum – ta-dum – ta-dum – ta-dum –

ta-dum – ta-dum – ta-dum –

ta-dum – ta-dum – ta-dum – ta-dum –

ta-dum – ta-dum – ta-dum –

ta-dum – ta-dum – ta-dum – ta-dum –

dum-ta – ta-dum – ta-dum –

ta-dum – ta-dum – ta-dum – ta-dum –

ta-dum – ta-dum – ta-dum –

The metrics of our sentence would look like this:

I-have – a-lit – tle-shape –

It-would – not-crowd – your-desk –

Nor-make – much-rack – et –

Like – the-mouse –

That-dents – your-Gal – ler-ies –

A perfect quatrain. As with the poem, there is no rhyme, but the poem has a trochaic foot in the sixth line. The sentence is rigidly unrhymed iambic trochaic.

If we ta-dum the previous sample sentence with the lines of a quatrain, we get the following:

dum-ta – da-dum –

Now is the time

ta-dum – ta-dum –

For all good men

ta-dum – ta-da-dum –

To come to the aid

ta-da – dum – ta

of the party

It’s those anapests – the ta-da-dums – that give the catchy melody to the sentence. The syntax, the word order arranged by transformations, is my conception of style as I shall use the word in this book. Word order in nonfiction is my game. So I have to pay attention to prose rhythm.

Rhythm is intrinsic to all the arts. One of my favorite photographs made by my friend Dave Sadler is of three gulls flying in the sky. Their wings are in the same position, the direction of their flight is the same, the distances apart of their images are the same, but the distances from the viewer are different, making their sizes different, making them move. Rhythm is movement toward something. When my friend Dave Sadler was reading my manuscript for this work, he noticed something about my mention of the photo of three gulls. He got out the negative he used for the picture. He saw that in the darkroom he had taken out a fourth gull. It spoiled the image, he said. Yes, I said, you put rhythm into the picture; the fourth gull was flying in a different direction. This is a perfect example of how the artist can change nature to create an art object. Rhythm is obviously present in art, poetry, music, and dance. If you think of the Parthenon and Frank Gehry’s architecture, you see plenty of rhythm. We’ve had a glimpse of it in prose. Is there more to it than the occasional anapest?

The following idiomatic sentence was written by Dorothy Norman in her editor’s statement in the publication Twice a Year: A Book of Literature, the Arts, and Civil Liberties (1942). Her idealism and her elevated, formal style characterize the piece in which this sentence stands out. It has a strong rhythmic beat and moves forward to the central point. We were already in the war, but Dorothy Norman’s pacifist leanings still compel her to challenge the public support of the war:

The fact that the majority in America seem to believe in combating what threatens the core of our civilization on the field of battle, no matter whose the original fault, no matter whose the original error, no matter what the risk, no matter what the lack of clarity involved: this is the extraordinary fact.

I remember well how I reacted to this statement. I was a rookie private in the army and also a member of “the majority in America.” Also willing to pay a large price (like two dollars) for something to read in the barracks. How can this woman criticize my intelligence? As far as I was concerned it was Hitler’s fault, the Draft Board made no error, I knew the risk I was taking, and nothing could be clearer. So there, Miss Norman. Ah, the sublime innocence of youth! (I was twenty-four.)

Now, as an old man looking for rhythm in good sentences, I appreciate her words mightily. The sentence has a strong rhythmic beat, it moves forward to its concluding element, and it makes a strong central point. The beauty of the sentence lies in the idiom “no matter wh__” that introduces each repeated negative phrase. Idioms are the flavor of one’s native language, usually ungrammatical and confounding to the parser and diagrammer. H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage says (that’s an idiom) that idiomatic English is “natural or racy or unaffected.” The foreign speaker learning English puzzles over idioms and makes crazy mistakes. He might come up with (another idiom) “The fault whose doesn’t matter.” For the native speaker, the correct and casual use of idioms is the sign of a realistic and often earthy perspective. The native listeners recognize the speaker as one of them; he is not talking down (another idiom) or hiding behind a screen. A forthright use of idiom imports into print the colloquial mode and its stylistic advantages.

The Oxford English Dictionary found “no matter wh__” in print as early as 1550. It is the elliptical vestige of something like “it is no matter” and must have gone through (another one) many speakers before achieving currency and respectability and status as a synonym for “regardless of” or “in spite of.” In Miss Norman’s sentence it seems stronger than the synonyms would be, probably because of the power of “no.” It’s more sweeping, more absolute. At any rate, (there I go again – and again, even in parentheses; those racy idioms must be recursive) that idiom contrasts sharply with the rest of the sentence. “Threatens the core of our civilization on the field of battle” is so overblown and hackneyed that the sentence would have fallen in a heap (that’s an analogy instead of an idiom, according to Fowler) had Norman not used the wonderful idiom four times to give the sentence some muscle (another analogy – or call it a metaphor).

TRANSFORMATIONS

Giving your sentences some variation is a good recommendation for writers. This manual enthusiastically recommends it, asks for it, begs for it, demands it, will keep you after school if you don’t obey. It’s the whole point of the manual. There are any number of ways to vary sentences. Syntactic variation is my aim, changes in the order of words, phrases, and clauses. Transformations. When changes in position are made, several other kinds of changes also occur because transformations are fundamental. When an architect makes one change in his plan anything else can change. A change in the size of a window may require a different color of rug, a different drain in the shower. I remember a movie like that with Cary Grant. Myrna Loy wanted some little changes and Cary got stuck paying for major alterations.

I’ll build a paragraph and try some changes.

There’s a park in that part of the city that we visited often. There’s a beautiful fountain there that always refreshed us just to look at it from a distance. There used to be a kiosk there where we’d buy a magazine and sit down and read, but there is nothing commercial there any longer.

I don’t like all the “theres.” There must be a way to change that. Some of the “theres” are the result of a particular transformation. It’s an empty word, has only grammatical meaning. As in Rudy Vallee’s drinking song “There Is a Tavern in the Town.” Without the transformation, the kernel that underlies it would be “A tavern is in the town.” The kernel nearly always has the verb “is,” but Emily Dickinson wrote a sentence that doesn’t: “There comes a wind like a bugle.” The kernel would be “A wind comes like a bugle.” The kernel in “there” transformations usually ends with an adverb denoting place. In my paragraph, the places are “that part of the city,” “there,” and “in the park.” Emily Dickinson, of course, goes her own way. She ends her sentence with an adverbial phrase “like a bugle” denoting how the wind acts, not where. She needed that because she chose the verb “come.” But her sentence still uses the “there” transformation.

“There” can also be a full adverb itself, not an empty grammatical word. I wrote two of them in my paragraph: “a fountain there” and “a kiosk there.”

A good copy editor would have red marks all over my paragraph. She would cut out two “there” transformations and one of the “there” adverbs. This is what she would send to the printer with no objections from me:

We often visited the park in that part of the city. The beautiful fountain there refreshed us, just to look at it from a distance. We bought a magazine in the kiosk and sat down and read, but now there’s nothing commercial in the park.

Instead of the “be” verbs, also rather empty, except for tense, she uses “visited” and “refreshed” and “buy” as the main verbs. They put life in the scene. She keeps the final “there” transformation, giving “commercial” an emphasis that makes a strong assertion. And she saved a line of type. In art, they say, less is more.

Suppose the copy editor tries another transformation that I’ll call the “it’s” transformation. Notice the apostrophe. (If you go back to Emily Dickinson’s poem in her letter to Mr. Higginson, she writes “And it should lift it’s purple Dikes.” There’s no “it’s” transformation in that line. Her spelling was bad; she meant “its,” the possessive pronoun and together with the two relative pronouns “it” in the poem all the itses refer to the antecedent “Orient.”) The “it’s” in the transformation, another empty word, is often followed by an adjective signaling a “that” noun clause. The “it’s” transformation has the stylistic effect of emphasizing one word:

It’s true that baby rats are cute.

It’s horrible that Aunt Lucy eats worms.

It’s incredible that President Buchanan was homosexual.

But not any old adjective can be emphasized in that way:

It’s blue that . . .

It’s large that . . .

It’s swift that . . .

My paragraph could use the “it’s” transformation sometimes:

It was often that we visited the park in that part of the city. It was refreshing just to look at the fountain from a distance. We used to buy a magazine in the kiosk, but it’s just as well that nothing commercial is allowed in the park now.

Notice that “it’s” has to be “it was.” The adjective “often” doesn’t work here, but it would be fine if negative: “It wasn’t often that . . .” If I were teaching a class, I would suggest that the students could do an interesting study of different types of adjectives with “it’s” and negatives. Maybe they could determine whether “often” is an adjective or an adverb.

Other changes in syntax could be used with these sentences; any writer with a little ingenuity can easily make them without the trained skill of a linguist. The native speaker of English has the transformations already installed and stored on his mental hard disk. When a writer feels that a sentence is unclear or awkward, he revises by ringing some transformational changes on it.

PUNCTUATION

My teacher-colleagues would have ridiculed me had I, back then, called a sentence a complete thought. Now I like the idea and leave it as part of my definition of a sentence. It’s a reasonable idea, providing we are talking about a written sentence. All of my sample sentences are complete thoughts because the writers punctuated them as complete thoughts. When the writer has put a period down at the end of a group of words, he has completed the thought he is expressing. Only the writer knows that; it’s his thought. It’s the writer, not the reader, or the linguist, or the epistemologist who determines when his thought is complete. The thought may be dumb, irrelevant, weird, or thoughtless, but he is expressing it as he likes and ending its expression when he wants to. The writer is the only master of his own thoughts. I labor the point because I want writers to accept their privileges and responsibilities in the matter of the style and thought of his own sentences. In every sentence he writes, he must make and has the opportunity to make countless changes.

A sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a period. That’s it. The punctuation code has evolved over the course of several centuries and is still evolving. It’s a difficult code to learn. Copy editors manage it, and writers keep personalizing it. Emily Dickinson pretty much ignored it. Regardless of the firm rules that editors follow from their style books, punctuation is to an important degree subjective and can be controlled by the writer’s predilections. It can be stylistically expressive. The writer can use punctuation so subtly that only an alert reader familiar with the writer’s style will be aware of some of his meanings. The writer’s own way of using semicolons, say, may lead to misinterpretation. Punctuation is a loose code. It is also extremely important for effective communication.

Lewis Mumford, author of several weighty dissertations on machines and cities, made the colon a distinctive part of his style. The colon, probably the least popular mark of punctuation, is usually found in sentences in which a complete statement announces an important piece of information that follows the colon: an emphatic completion of the sentence, like this one. The University of Chicago Press, Manual of Style points out, mysteriously, that the colon is used “to mark a discontinuity of grammatical construction greater than that indicated by a semicolon and less than that indicated by a period.” Less and more are anybody’s guess. Mumford often reinforces his declaratory style by using a colon. You need read only half a page to find an example. He uses the colon to announce what is coming, but he uses it for other reasons as well. I choose at random a passage from The City in History. (p. 284)

But there is still a brewery in Bruges which now occupies almost one whole side of Waalplaats, built on the same scale as the residence beside it: the loading is done in the courtyard.

At first glance the colon is puzzling. Why doesn’t Mumford use a period? Isn’t the thought complete? What’s the continuity to the part after the colon. A more alert reading of the preceding sentence provides the context to explain that colon:

The competition for space between the domestic and the working quarters, as business grew and the scale of production expanded, was doubtless responsible for encroachment over the original back gardens by shed, storage bins, and special workshops.

It’s clear now that the colon subtly links the apparently incidental comment about loading to the idea in the preceding sentence about the competition between domestic and working quarters and that loading is encroaching over the courtyard. We know now that loading is a working quarters matter and the courtyard is living quarters. The colon announces one result of the encroachment, the loading. The colon is doing its job of completing the thought. A period would lose the connection. I accept Mumford’s sentence as one complete though as punctuated. I must disagree with the University of Chicago Press saying that the semicolon indicates a closer link between two grammatical elements than does a colon. I leave you to ponder the extremely colonic structure of the following sentence from Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine. (p. 66)

What Huizinga says of play is basic to man’s early expression in ritual: ritual creates order and is order: indeed, it is probably the aboriginal form of that make-believe which is inseparable from human culture: the game, the drama, the ceremony, the contest, in fact the whole range of the symbolic performance.

Three colons in one sentence! And it is still just one sentence according to my definition.

As I have said, people do not speak spontaneously in sentences. Sentences are written artifacts. Structural linguists observed that in the human utterance various vocal pauses and changes in the pitch and stress of our stream of syllables give the listener a great many clues to our meaning. Some of these clues have been translated into our punctuation code. Thus the “terminal juncture group” translates to the period. Think of the sound as the parallel to a full cadence in music, a concluding note. “Down by the the gas house, free BEER” (or “Shave and a haircut, two BITS”) as a musical conclusion. Equating the terminal juncture group to the period fails when the voice changes one or more of the features of the sound. Speakers don’t always drop their voice when they pause, and a pause may come even in the middle of a word. Strictly translating the sounds into punctuation could result in what the English teacher would call run‑on sentences or sentence fragments, grave errors that she corrects with punctuation. I have no scientific proof of writers hearing their sentences as they write, but I know I hear mine. My mind catches every nuance. Remember Harold Hill in “The Music Man”? He got the kids to play instruments by thinking the tunes.

As I write, I think and hear my sentences, punctuation included. My earliest training in the rules of grammar taught me the classic form of the written English sentence: a subject followed by a verb and whatever goes with the verb, together with syntactic transformations. In short I like my words to conform to conventional syntax. I punctuate accordingly. When I silently pronounce sentences, I’m aware of various kinds of pauses and also of the length of my thoughts. I believe I’m conscious of regulating the length of my sentences. When I feel that I have said enough for my mind to apprehend the proper shape of the thought, I pause, I type a period. I assume (guess, that is) that my reader follows the rhythm of my thoughts and sentences.

I think all the marks of punctuation. Commas are the hardest. When I listen to myself write, I can hear a slight rise in pitch and a slight pause. So I type a comma. But there are so many degrees of pitch and pause that I can’t be sure what I want until I look at the words and let their meanings make the decisions. I’m not consistent with commas.

In the publications I read these days, my school-teacher inclinations see lots of run‑on sentences and sentence fragments. Writers are creative and follow their own rules. Editors seem to accept them readily. Editors understand that writers break the old rules for the sake of creative expression.

(Time out. I have a doctor’s appointment.)

Yesterday my driver, Dave, and I went to the hospital and saw the urologist’s nurse practitioner. We always chat up those cute women:

NP: What did you do, what was your occupation?

Me: I’m a retired English professor.

NP: Oh, who’s your favorite author?

Me: Right now, me.

Dave: He’s writing a book.

NP: What about?

Me: Style and grammar.

NP: Oh, English grammar. Did you diagram sentences in school? Yeah, that was awful. I hated it.

Dave: Me too. I’ve forgotten all that junk. What good was it? I’d never use it.

Me: When did you graduate from high school?

NP: 1982.

Dave: 1953.

Me: And I graduated in 1936. Loved diagramming.

NP: Really? English never changes.

You can say that again. English never changes. The way it’s taught, that is. But English, like every language, is always changing. That includes the rules. Reputable writers break them all the time. They write run‑on sentences and sentence fragments fearlessly. Editors allow them, understanding that where writers put a period or a comma is a deliberate stylistic choice. Teachers, of course, don’t dare accept readily what may be a student’s ignorance of the code.

I have chosen some passages I ran across in a book of essays from about fifteen years ago. The writers must be respectable because they were included in this book, The Best Essays of 1995. In spite of their nontraditional punctuation, are they good (correct)? Would you change the punctuation? Would you change something else? Does their punctuation convey any special meaning that you could express in a different way?

This drama had to be played out by the rules of passion. She denied my allegations, I returned to the window. She got out of bed, her face wet with tears, to prevent me from leaving in anger. She had only a T‑shirt on. (Joel Agee, p. 28)

The ambulance people came, and I whispered to them that I could not walk or sit up. Or breathe. They went down for a gurney and for oxygen. (Harold Brodkey, p. 42)

The exterior of the cathedral, like the day outside, was large, suburban, bland. Inside were perhaps sixty quiet men, a few women, in a great dim space splashed with stained glass and saints, banners and candles and embroidered robes. Rituals of ancient times, employed to comfort sufferers of the modern plague. (Dudley Clendinen, p. 66)

I think about food. Just boiled water for instant Ramen noodles, threw in the spice packet and made my own sauce of watered down ketchup, basil, sesame seeds and soy sauce. With oil, a drop or two. There’re two pork chops in the refrigerator, rib ends at 1.99/lb, and these would be good later, with teriyaki sauce, pepper, and basil again, broiled with a spray of brown sugar when it’s close to done, a spray done with the hand, watercress on the side, that’s enough. And perhaps wine. No potatoes, no night shade. No grains with the meat. (Josephine Foo, p. 93)

The kitchen was permanent, irredeemable, irresistible kink. Unassimibly African. No matter what you did, no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t de-kink a person’s kitchen. So you trimmed off as best you could. (Henry Louis Gates, p. 119)

It wasn’t just the drama of the animals, it was the landscape. (Diana Kappel-Smith, p. 141)

UNITY AND COHERENCE

I heard a writer say he was going crazy revising what he had written the day before. “Why don’t they make a computer that would do that for me?” An ad for movie software says “Rewriting is the bread and butter of the professional screenwriter.” And then it tries to sell you Magic Software that will make your Apple computer a revising machine that will do that horrible job “painlessly.”

Making text (I know some of that lingo) coherent is an important part of revision. Thoughts have to hang together. English provides pronouns to do that job. He, her, that in a sentence hangs it together with John, Mary, chocolate in a sentence coming before. “Why did he give her that?” is the cohering response to “John is allergic to chocolate.” The sentences are tightly bound together. I assume that the more coherent sentences are the longer they can be and still be one complete thought. For example, a sentence containing dozens of items in a long series separated by commas may be too long for a reader to comprehend, unless the items are organized in some simplifying way to reduce the separateness of them. Human perception can easily see wholeness (unity) in up to seven parts, but beyond seven, coherence weakens. If you’re asked to get eight items of groceries, you either have to write them down or organize them in your mind in a small number of related groups. (1. milk, butter, cheese; 2. wieners, bacon, and a chicken; 3. crackers, bread, cookies, and potato chips.) Three groups are easier to remember than seven.

Here are some ways that English helps sentences cohere: The crucial words are in italics:

He looked fine when I saw him Christmas, but the next day he died.

The Dodgers took the Series that night, and the score was announced simultaneously on Johnny Carson.

Ronnie spent his allowance generously, but as for Jimmie, he’s a tightwad.

Diana is always mocking the members, and that’s why we blackballed her.

Tom, Dick, and Harry like movies and all of them want to be doctors.

The baby was cranky about getting up and she was the same at bedtime.

There were fifteen football players on the bus; I didn’t think it would be so quiet.

The hotel was all lit up, and the top floor was reserved for the Yankees.

Veronica saw the movie, and she read the novel too.

The secretary took the nominee’s names and he also passed out ballots.

I am impressed by how many ways the language enables us, almost forces us to bind words together. We would never say “Joe thought Joe owed it to Joe.” We say, “Joe thought he owed it to himself.” The pronouns make connections. Coherence can be caused by rhythm. Lincoln said repetitiously and rhythmically, “Of the people, by the people and for the people.” If he had said “of, by, and for the people,” the expression would not have become so classic. A fairly strict line separates prose from poetry. Regular meter and rhyme are outlawed in prose. Alliteration is discouraged. Prose is devoted more to the straight communication of thought. The indirectness of poetic expression is distracting. Writers avoid jerky sentences and dragging rhythm, jarring effects, monotonous, boring repetition. Revising is removing distracting rhythm. (I should remove at least one of the ings in that sentence.) A climactic conclusion, a heavy beat at the end. I write the sentence “His favorite sports were tennis, golf and intercollegiate football,” reserving the strong beat for the end. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “Their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.” Don’t revise those words.

SENTENCE SENSE

Writers have a sentence sense. When Annie Dillard was a girl, putting together the chaotic world of her perceptions, she composed and memorized sentences to keep things together. Playing detective, she tried to remember the face of a “suspect” who had a case of beer in his car. “He has a wide mouth; his mouth corners fall directly beneath his eyes’ outer corners . . .” It was easier to remember a sentence than a sight, and the sentences suggested sights new or skewed. She discovered, of course, that the world of her perceptions would not remain still fastened down with her sentences, but reading her An American Childhood convinces me that her sentence sense reinforced her memory of childhood images.

A writer without a sentence sense doesn’t exist. Experienced writers, I am sure, feel their work progressing sentence by sentence. Having begun a sentence they sense its ending. The fine tuning of revision is changing tiny details. Changing a detail in a present sentence can require a change anyplace in the previous parts. Each individual sentence is only settled when the whole piece is done. Sometimes a writer is so satisfied with one sentence that he chooses to cancel several others. He suffers an excruciating awareness of all aspects of his writing – the tone, the clarity, all the things I’ve been dealing with here. Underlying and supporting everything is his sentence sense. Compare it with the painter’s sense of contact with the canvas. Writing without a sentence sense would be like painting blind or painting like an elephant holding the brush, with his trunk. This may sound as if you have to be born a writer. If you’re blind, you’re blind; if you’re an elephant, you’re an elephant. On the contrary, I think writers develop their sentence sense. Practice, practice is the way to Carnegie Hall. Watch Itzhak Perlman play his violin and consider the practice that gave him his bowing sense. He doesn’t think about it, he just plays. He practiced endlessly, practiced the right things, as do the painter and the writer.

The rest of this manual contains my analyses of several dozen good sentences written by American writers, most of them writing in the twentieth century. You will notice that I often sound as if I’m reading the author’s mind. Impossible. I can’t avoid sounding like that because I have to attribute my thoughts to the writer. Every literary critic has to do that. He’s simply assuming that the writer knows what he is doing and so does he. He’s only describing the effect of the writing on him.

HENRY GEORGE: The Metaphoric Sentence

Henry George (1839–1897) wrote only one book of consequence. It was published in 1879 and was still in print in 1952 when I bought a copy. The Henry George Institute was founded in 1971 “in the belief that the philosophy of Henry George has important answers to today’s problems.” The institute subscribes to George’s main idea, a single tax on land. George had spent his early life as a sailor. At fifteen he sailed around the world and landed in San Francisco. There he became a printer in a new town. San Francisco was a town of criminals, shacks, and the destitute; he witnessed both progress and poverty. He began writing his book at night after having a revelation in San Francisco about land speculation and poverty:

I asked a passing teamster . . . what land was worth there. He pointed to some cows grazing so far off they looked like mice, and said, I don’t know exactly, but there’s a man over there who will sell some land for a thousand dollars an acre. [a fantastic price at the time] Like a flash it came over me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more for the privilege. (Wikipedia)

White parasols and elephants mad with pride are the flowers of a grant of land.

The sentence is a puzzler. How can “parasols” and “elephants” be linked together so casually and equated with “flowers”?

Henry George’s book deals with the national economy, advocating a single tax, an extremely radical notion, argued so convincingly and expressed so well that its devotees have been and still may be legion. George’s point is in two parts, the problem and the remedy. Our sample sentence concludes the section that analyzes the problem. He expresses it in the most prosaic way:

A consideration of the manner in which the speculative advance in land values cuts down the earnings of labor and capital and checks production, leads, I think, irresistibly to the conclusion that this is the main cause of industrial depressions to which every civilized country, and all civilized countries together, seem increasingly liable. . . . That land speculation is the true industrial depression is, in the United States, clearly evident. The land is the source of all wealth. It is the mine from which must be drawn the ore that labor fashions. . . . All the advantages gained by the march of progress go to the owners of land.

Nothing puzzling in these expository sentences leading up to our sentence: George’s writing is eminently clear, forceful, and direct. This sentence is the only one in the book that stirs the reader’s imagination with poetic indirection and poetic power. No wonder – George didn’t write it. Or, at least, he doesn’t want us to give him credit for it. He attributes it to the Brahmins, who “said it ages ago.” I have not found the origin of the words. The entire passage he quotes does not seem to be from a poem: “To whomsoever the soil at anytime belongs, to him belong the fruits of it. White parasols and elephants mad with pride are the flowers of a grant of land.” The striking imagery, “white parasols” and “elephants mad with pride” comes clear with some historical perspective.

The Brahmins, the Hindu priestly caste, resented the usurpations of the colonizing power, the British Empire. How bland would be a prosaic statement of their anger: The life-style of the British class is the privilege they have seized, the product of the land they have stolen from us and granted to themselves. But in our sentence, picture an English lady strolling in the sun under a white parasol shading her delicate white skin. Picture a highly trained elephant in the employ of an English landowner, sharing arrogantly in the superiority and pride of the Raj. These images are alive and give this otherwise indifferent sentence its distinction.

HENRY MILLER: The Contextual Sentence

When I was in college, Henry Miller’s books were banned in the library. They were so dirty, some of them, they were even banned by law and were confiscated by the authorities who searched the baggage of travelers returning from France. The only one we could find, The Colossus of Marousi, was so much fun that my friends and I read it aloud to each other. It was a perfectly clean book about Greece. A few years later, when I came across The Tropic of Cancer and The Tropic of Capricorn, I blushed. They don’t seem that dirty today.

I chose this sentence because it is singled out as “one surprisingly good sentence” in a review by Bernard Devoto of Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a book about a trip Miller took across the country. I respect Devoto’s opinion and want to justify it. (Even though he considered the book dated and sophomoric.) First of all, the sentence is a fragment, a sin in Miss Kottke’s eyes, but I accept it as a complete thought. Devoto had no objection to fragments either; he wrote two of them in his review. He probably had smuggled a couple of Miller’s earlier books across the border as well.

Our sentence is the final one of the chapter called “From Grand Canyon to Burbank.”

The real California began to make itself felt. I wanted to puke. But you have to get a permit to vomit in public. So I drove into a hotel and took a room with a radio apparatus that looked like a repository for dirty linen. Bing Crosby was crooning away – the same old tune which I had heard in Chattanooga, Boswell’s tavern, Chickamauga and other places. I wanted Connie Boswell but they were out of her for the moment. I took my socks off and hung them around the knob of the radio to choke it off. There were no beetles or bed-bugs – just the heavy roar of the traffic on the concrete strip. And Bing Crosby, of course, somewhere out in the blue on the invisible ether waves owned by the five-and-ten cent store.

Writers characteristically lead up to a final sentence just as a composer leads up to a full cadence. Unlike this fragment, the typical final sentence sounds like a final sentence. This one sounds like a footnote or a PS, something tacked on. Miller must have wanted it that way, like a thought that just occurred to him. It’s part of his talky style. Don’t be fooled into thinking Miller was just winging it thoughtlessly.

On the contrary, this sentence reinforces the main point of the entire chapter. The chapter presents two Californias, the real California that made him want to puke and the ethereal one that expresses his dream, the lost “paradise” of his imagined pioneers coming through the pass and looking down on a new world. His imagined world, as invoked in the chapter is “somewhere about a mile up towards God” and he wants to go back through the pass “on foot, holding my hat reverently and saluting the Creator.” Miller wants to be out in the blue. Bing Crosby got there on the ether waves, but Miller knows that the ethereal California has been swallowed up by the dime-store world of the real California. He gives the real California the last word in this sentence.

Nobody loved the West more than Bernard Devoto. He wrote his best books about it. One understands his appreciation of this sentence. It’s ironic that Henry Miller stayed in California and made his home a mecca on the beach for the kind of sophomoric young people, idealistic hippies, that Devoto hated.

There is a lesson in this – look at an expert witness’s sensitivity to a good sentence. The effective sentence gets its strength from its relevance and appropriateness to context. Taken from the web of logical, semantic, and metaphorical threads that give the sentence its place in the context, the sentence is stripped of everything but grammatical structure. The good writer reinforces his sentences with a variety of contextual references that enrich the web.

JAMES BALDWIN: The Logical Sentence

I first read James Baldwin in an essay in a magazine. It was about how a black American feels living in Europe, and it was powerful. I knew I had found a really great writer. It was 1953, early in the civil rights movement, before all the demonstrations and marches. What I was reading by white writers in liberal publications gave me my stance on race relations. Like those writers, I was a naive partisan, waiting for ignition. I think Baldwin, with his later essays, was the spark for white liberal engagement. Baldwin taught us both outrage and understanding of the terribly complex matter that race relations in America is. Nobody else had Baldwin’s expressiveness and legitimacy.

Baldwin’s works are on the shelves of the Library of American Literature, a good sign of his permanence as a writer. Our sentence is from an essay in Nobody Knows My Name (1960):

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself. Walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we, this nation, have become.

Four “ones” in the sentence express the tone of formality and seriousness. “One” is everybody, and Baldwin meant everybody, male and female, black and white.

In his essays, Baldwin always deals with black and white, both logically (opposites) and socially (oppositionally). He always chooses the extreme word, the word that defies subtle distinctions: “a terrible, an inexorable law.” No shades of gray, no maybe. Some writers comb their thesauruses for synonyms that fine-tune their sentences and lose the reader who wants bottom-line meaning, but Baldwin chooses the absolute word for life-or-death confrontation: In the village essay, in sentences referring to the race problem, this is Baldwin’s vocabulary: disastrous, inescapable, impossibility, unforeseeable, terrorization, indispensable, bottomless, dead, monster, and absoluteness. The last word is the tone of the piece; it’s what grabbed me. For Baldwin, there was an absolute, fundamental discord between the races.

The main verb of our sentence is “is” and its complement is “law.” Given that framework, the sentence demands elements that are unyielding and uncompromising. Every element that follows conforms to the pattern, either negative or insistently extreme. The colon announces the ironic consequence of the law as it affects “one.” It also introduces the final sentence of the essay, the consequence to the nation: “Walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we, this nation, have become.”

“We” are all of us, according to the inexorable law, and in Harlem black and white see and are seen by each other, and in that vision, both can know what the nation has become; Baldwin’s exacting logic has worked out a painful irony. Our sentence is the key to the essay.

JOHN HERSEY: The Atomic Sentence

When John Hersey was assigned the job of describing a situation, how it feels to survive the greatest catastrophe in history, he faced the challenge of creating new images he never before had seen in print. Our sentence is from a description of something no writer Hersey knew about had ever put down in words before. He was challenged to invent new ways to express the hitherto never expressed. Hersey met the challenge a year after the tragedy. His was the first detailed picture of the human dimension of the atom bomb explosion. Everything had to be given careful explanation. Our sentence from Hiroshima was a challenge for its many readers as well. What does an atomic explosion sound like? What’s an atomic burn?

Our sentence focuses on one tiny facet of the atomic burn, presenting an astonishing unknown fact, not in itself a painful matter but completely surprising for Hersey and his readers of the result of the explosion. In the sentence, he works up to it in stages and saves the shock and irony to the end. The point comes to the reader as it probably came to observers at the scene.

On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns – of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos.

First we see naked bodies – not unexpected. Then we see that on the bodies are patterns – slightly surprising. At this point, Hersey uses a dash – something new coming up. He has to prepare us for shock. The expected patterns, of straps and suspenders, segues into “the skin of some women” – why women? He explains carefully this curious circumstance in parentheses (not because it is incidental information but necessarily because it is a new, strange fact of life). Finally we get the shocker, “the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos.” The ironic symbol of the death not only of 80 to 100 thousand Japanese lives but of Japanese culture, which the bomb had reduced to a reflection on the backs of Japanese women.

I must emphasize that Hersey’s sentence puts the new information about atomic bombs into parentheses not so that the reader can skip over it but because it prepares the reader for the shock of the new. If we do skip over it lightly, we have to go back and pay attention to it.

A term paper about The New Yorker’s “Hiroshima” written by Steve Rothman of Trinity College and published on the Internet is worth checking out. Rothman says that two editors and the author spent over a week editing the manuscript and Harold Ross made over two hundred queries about the words. Can a wrecked bicycle be called “lopsided”? They agreed on “crumpled.” Rothman says, “Every sentence was carefully deliberated.”

E. L. DOCTOROW: The Two Narrators Sentence

One difference between the prose of fiction and the prose of nonfiction is that the writer of fiction is creating a fictional narrator’s voice, a voice that is not his own. He uses his own voice in the real world of his life. All the references in his fiction sentences point to the world his imagination is creating. Henry James believed that every sentence of “characterization” is at the same time a sentence that moves the action of the plot. And so on; all the sentences contribute to all the functions that keep the novelist’s fictional world whole. The novelist is a juggler keeping all the balls in the air.

The narrator of E. L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate (1989) is a boy who takes great pride in being able to juggle things with his quick hands. As the narrator, he juggles the functions of storytelling as well as Henry James.

All the cans came back except one, and if a crowd had been standing around, which there wasn’t, for who in the fresh world of the morning wants to watch the cleanup of the night before, the truck motors grinding, the ashcans hitting the sidewalk with that tympanic carelessness of the profession, nobody would have noticed that the truck drove away with one packed garbage can embedded in all that odorous crap of the glamorous night, or dreamed that in an hour or two it would be shoveled by tractor deep below the anguished yearnings of the flights of seagulls wheeling over the Flushing Meadow landfill.

Our sentence focuses on a garbage can representing to an onlooker the routine of the everyday world of the big city that Doctorow created. This big city world shows itself in several of its facets in the sentence: morning in the city, the city of the working person, the glamorous nightlife of the city, its residue of crap, its connection to the natural world – the feeding gulls. But, of course, we do not see any of this directly. All of it is what Billy and Doctorow see.

Billy is a special onlooker in the novel, a boy who has been drawn into the lives of Dutch Schultz and his gang and to tell what he sees. Or not to tell what he sees. What he has just seen is a terrible murder by Schultz, and he is looking at the garbage can containing the body of the victim. It is not the first murder by Schultz that he has seen, but it is the most shocking. The victim is a fire inspector who has appeared at the door of Schultz’s headquarters possibly in the service of the city’s political system as a spy on the gang’s activities. Instead of simply getting him out of the building, Schultz falls on him, chokes him to death, and smashes his head to a pulp. Billy is sent for a garbage can and the monstrous Irving folds the body and pushes it into the can. Billy is now focusing on the can and reacting to its ordinary appearance. He is already trying to forget what he has seen, but even the image of the flying gulls will remind him. The sentence is freighted with the entire world of the novel, which is Billy’s world.

The question is, Who is talking? Billy is obviously perceiving, but just as obviously he is not speaking. These are not his words: “fresh world of the morning,” “tympanic carelessness,” and “anguished yearnings.” Doctorow is using his own vocabulary. “Which there wasn’t” and “crap” could be the everyday language of the boy from Brooklyn, but the language and the images of the workers and the seagulls are obviously Doctorow’s. He is not following the lead of Mark Twain, incorporating his own insights but attributing them to Huck Finn. Mark Twain did not merely suggest Huck’s speech, he created it wholly. For Doctorow, it was enough to suggest the boy’s voice. The somewhat loose structure suggests the boy’s artlessness, the innocent perspective – “Who would have thought?” – is the boy’s. The language that sustains the boy-narrator’s world. This distinction between the narrator’s voice and the author’s language is an admirable aspect of this remarkable fiction.

THORSTEIN VEBLEN: The Gobbledygook Sentence

The author of this sentence obviously had an “attitude.” His very popular book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) disparaged and satirized the wealthy of the Gilded Age. They are characterized as indulging in conspicuous consumption, a term created by him and so current and useful as to require no quotation marks.

Veblen was a Midwesterner with the Midwestern view of life associated with the humor of Garrison Keillor, Charles Schultz, and Sinclair Lewis. He came from a Norwegian-American farm family and his books show his attachment to the realities of earthy life. But he was a highly regarded economist and wrote several books of economic wisdom. Our sentence comes from his remarks about bequests by the wealthy to found “charitable” institutions, for a foundling asylum or retreat for invalids.

“The diversion of expenditure to honorific waste in such cases is not uncommon enough to cause surprise or even to raise a smile. An appreciable share of the funds is spent in the construction of an edifice faced with some aesthetically objectionable but expensive stone, covered with grotesque and incongruous details, and designed, in its battlemented walls and turrets and its massive portals and strategic approaches to suggest certain barbaric methods of warfare. The interior of the structure shows the same pervasive guidance of the canons of conspicuous waste and predatory exploit.”

Our sentence follows:

The windows, for instance, to go no further into detail, are placed with a view to express their pecuniary excellence upon the chance beholder from the outside, rather than with a view to effectiveness or comfort of the beneficiaries within; and the detail of interior arrangement is required to conform itself as best it may to this alien but imperious requirement of pecuniary beauty.

The passage preceding our sentence explains the humor, why the sight should “raise a smile.” It raised a smile to Veblen and would to any reader with an ounce of Veblen’s cynicism. The incongruity of spending large sums of money on over-decorating, with symbols of warfare, a building ostensibly built to succor the unfortunate may not have raised a smile among the leisure class of that day. What he describes is like putting a pink ribbon on a potato before offering it to a starving man. Veblen’s humor was not enjoyed by economists either, whose language for the most part was gobbledygook. But I’m sure Veblen’s thoughts would have pleased his architect contemporaries Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, who were revolutionizing the architecture of Chicago, where Veblen was teaching at the university.

Readers today appreciate Veblen’s humor, catching his style as parody of the writing of what he called “the higher learning.” Irony is his tool, irony and repetition. The tone is academic, very formal grammar. The passive voice. In spite of the specificity of his example of conspicuous waste, the language is general and abstract. Only the word “windows” represents a real thing. Only the idiom “as best it may” has a hint of the colloquial.

Both repetition and irony come into play in his repetition of “pecuniary” and its placement modifying the nouns “excellence” and especially “beauty.” How can anyone miss the irony and humor of “pecuniary beauty”? Putting two incompatible words together is Veblen’s favorite device of ironic incongruity. A sociologist writes “normative orientation,” which is merely pompous. Veblen goes a step further and writes “aesthetic nausea” and “honorific waste” and “invidious distinction.” The latter is such a commonly accepted phrase today that we don’t realize Veblen was talking about honor, not the difference between two terms. His use of “pecuniary” plays on the denotation money and the denotation greed. One senses Veblen’s glee when he nails the sentence down with “pecuniary beauty.”

JAMES AGEE: The Paralytic Sentence

In this sentence, the writer is struggling to write what he believes is ultimately inexpressible. He is at his wit’s end to do justice in words of an experience of overwhelming poignancy. Even though he is an accomplished poet and his partner is an outstanding photographer, he feels that their project, describing the lives of Alabama sharecroppers, would inevitably fail. The book found no market; I bought my copy the year it was published and quickly remaindered for a dollar. It is my most precious book. I am mystified remembering that one of my students told me he was going to burn the book when the class was over. Now it’s a classic book on the shelves of the Library of American Literature.

Our sentence is a desperate attempt to express Agee’s sense of failure. The chapter from which I chose the sentence is named “Colon,” an introduction to the microscopic examination of the hopelessly impoverished daily lives of three families, a painful attempt to explain how difficult it will be in view of the infinitely complex situation in which the individual sharecropper passes his existence. How, he asks in the chapter, can words written “only one word at a time” and “as if all in one sentence” be made to “yield it out that all strikes inward upon this center at once and in all its intersections and in the meaning of interrelations and inter-enhancements?” The difficulty paralyzes.

The way he writes the sentence symbolizes the paralysis:

Here at a center is a creature: It would be our business to show how through every day of every year of his existence alive he is from all sides streamed in upon, bombarded, pierced, destroyed by that enormous sleeting of all objects forms and ghosts how great how small no matter, which surround and which his senses take: in as great and perfect and exact particularity as we can name them.

We must assume that he knew the strange shape of the sentence, that he deliberately wrote a paralyzed sentence. It begins in a state of tension and uncertainty when he chooses the words “would be our business” rather than “will be.” It would be – if – if it were possible. And his doubt becomes the reader’s. Then he specifies the every-ness of time, superfluously, that his creature’s “existence alive” (Does he have a dead existence as well?) is to be his focus, the individual human being subjected to the “sleeting” of everything in his world. The grammatical status of “sleeting” seems slightly obscure, but Agee proceeds to the quite unusual “how great how small no matter” and the curiously ungrammatical “which surround and whom his senses take.” The only way I can help make this clause grammatical is to insert the word “him” pointing to the antecedent “he,” but then I’m left with “and whom his senses take” and I’m stumped. If you can parse it, let me know.

With these anomalies, can we give the sentence a pass? I prefer to call it paralyzed and therefore symbolic of Agee’s mental state as he prepares to express the inexpressible. Were the “flaws” intentional? Intentionally writing a bad sentence seems too perverse. Agee was taking a great risk writing a paralyzed sentence. I grant him that privilege. I grant him also the privilege of using colons after “creature” and “take” instead of a period and a comma respectively.

STEPHEN JAY GOULD: The Periodic Sentence

The late Stephen Jay Gould was a highly awarded paleontologist professor at Harvard, many of whose publications were in popular science. His writings for Natural History magazine were first class in both style and content.

If we sensibly consider the limitations of memory and the limitations of the reader’s knowledge and patience, writers must avoid overloading the space between the first and last word of a sentence. The writer’s limits are infinite; he can write infinitely before putting down a period. The reader’s bites of input, like the hard disc’s bytes, can be compressed.

Our sentence from Gould’s Eight Little Piggies (1993) is compressive.

Progress as a predictable result of ordered causes there becomes a double delusion – first because we must seek its cause more in the quirkiness of the wheel, turning tires into sandals and big brains toward fear of death, than in the plodding predictability of the wedge, propelling monkeys into men; and secondly because the supposed sweep of life toward progress only records our myopic focus on the right tail of a distribution whose mode has never moved from a prokaryotic cell.

This sentence is compressive. It is an extremely well made summary sentence that has compressed two chapters of Eight Little Piggies. Only the reader who has paid attention to Gould’s discussion, a subtly argued put-down of the notion that evolution necessarily means progress, can possibly follow this compression. Many sentences this long are easy to comprehend because the writer demonstrates by its structure how his mind is moving: making a general assertion, then modifying it in a phrase, then adding an incidental thought, then listing descriptive examples, then repeating something for emphasis, then concluding with some strong syllables to show he is taking a breath. This kind of sentence is sometimes referred to as a loose sentence. Some rhetoricians claim that a loose sentence shows a man thinking. The suggestion is that the writer doesn’t know his thought until he has composed the sentence.

This contrasts with the periodic sentence, which supposedly expresses the completed thought that the writer knew before he put the words together. Whether these options are true is arguable, but the distinction is ancient and useful. Gould’s sentence, at any rate, is definitely periodic and we can be sure he formed his thought before he put these words down. We note that “double” becomes “first” and “secondly,” the major divisions in his design. Next we see that the “first” also has two parts, the “more in” and the “than in.” Each part of this comparison is fleshed out with parallel “‑ings.” The second major division proceeds with the guideposts of “supposed” and “only” and “myopic,” all of these words signaling the faulty evidence of progress, and “never” conclusively refuting any argument. This architecture of the sentence is orderly, clear, and strong. Less compression would have made it easier for a reader not versed in discussing this subject to understand.

The compression in the sentence is accomplished by the allusions and metaphors that fill out the design, each of them succinctly expressing a significant idea in the discussion of evolution, some of the metaphors Darwin’s own. Even in scientific writing, the poetic metaphor makes a good and efficient sentence more readable when compression is necessary. The big bite of information in this sentence I won’t chew over here; it is fully decompressed in Gould’s chapters “Wheels and Wedges” and “Tires to Sandals.”

WILLIAM GIBSON: The Triple Ambiguity Sentence

Much of the autobiography from which this sentence is taken is as confessional and painful as this, the introspective description of the author’s family and his tension in recording their lives. The book is A Mass for the Dead, by William Gibson, the story of his ancestors. Gibson was a poet and playwright (“The Miracle Worker”) whose sixty-four year marriage to a psychoanalyst may account for the tenor of this work.

In every deed they saw me choose to divest myself of semblance to them, until on his deathbed my father with his eyes on the son he had created to perpetuate him – young sloven in his twenties, who had quit church, quit college, quit jobs, quit his family for communists, quit communists for a bride, quit his bride for a mistress, and came from writing on a fraudulent stipend of public relief checks in a tenement such as my parents had put behind them a generation ago – in fact failed to recognize me.

The sentence is a flash of the writer’s memory coinciding with a flash from the father’s slow death, an ironic reversal in which the life flashing before the eye is the writer’s life and the death is the father’s. It is not clear from the context whether the father’s failure to recognize the son is because the father is too far gone to recognize anyone or because the son is and has been an unrecognizable person in his eyes – or in the son’s own eyes. I assume the triple ambiguity is intentional. The dominant meaning, if we consider the way the son writes the sentence, is the son’s confession. Even if my father were completely conscious he would not recognize this failure, this quitter, this fraud, as the son he loved. “Recognize” is the joker in this deck.

The sentence incorporates the writer’s perspective at several times in his life, first generally “in every deed” during his life, then in the moment’s situation at the father’s bed, then in his many experiences of quitting, and then in the “fraudulent” attempt to be a writer. Finally comes the writer’s realization of the irony, which fuses all the moments and periods in on one flash, the perfect conclusion for the sentence.

That one single sentence manages to integrate many time perspectives with this writer’s skill and also acts as a dramatic illustration of the genius of our English grammar that can manage such manipulation of time in one simple past tense.

I want to analyze another ambiguous sentence because ambiguity is such an important element of language. The sentence is not from a literary source. I saw it this morning on a jar of strawberry jam.

With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.

The slogan was created by an advertising executive, Lois Wyse, in 1962. Wyse wrote sixty-five books, including Funny, You Don’t Look Like A Grandmother, which was on The New York Times best seller list, and made into a musical. (With a name like Lois Wyse . . .)

When I first saw this sentence, I noticed its ambiguity, two meanings. First, it meant that Smucker is the name of a company with the reputation of making good jam and that I should buy their jam rather than a jam without the fine reputation. Smucker’s is good jam. With this meaning, the slogan could be used by any company: With a name like Kodak . . . With a name like Ford . . . With a name like General Electric. . . .

The other meaning I got is that Smucker is such a goofy name that the company had to compensate for it by making extra good jam. I Googled the slogan and found a small opinion poll asking people what the slogan means to them. The respondents all said that it meant Smucker’s is good jam. But the word Smucker itself meant either of two things: goofy name or reputable name, the respondents were about evenly divided. One of the respondents made a translation: With a name like Dog-Poop, it must be good.

The company knows the slogan is ambiguous: “Initially it referred to the unusual name with the connotation that since it was such an odd name the company had better produce outstanding products. As the company’s reputation has grown and the name Smucker has become associate with high-quality products, the slogan meaning changed somewhat. According to customers, if you see the Smucker name on a product, you have assurance that the product will be good.”

Notice that the company uses the term “will be” and loses the force of the powerful idiom “has to.” I discovered in Google that when the original immigrant, Christian Schmucker, came to America from Switzerland in 1762 he kept the unfortunate name Schmucker. His great grandson David changed it to Smoker, but his son, Jerome, who founded the company, changed it to Smucker because it was more fitting for a conservative family. David Schmucker must have known the Yiddish term Schmuck, meaning fool, jerk, or asshole, is derived from the word for penis.

WILLIAM ALEXANDER PERCY: The Flooded Sentence

A flood is nature’s largest phenomenon in many respects. The flood of the Mississippi in 1927 was monstrous. Scientists describing flood size depended on physical measurement: 50 feet above the levees, 27,000 square miles, etc. The synonyms for large that have been called upon to suggest its size – colossal, gigantic, massive, and so on – leave the reader unimpressed. It takes a sentence to make a flood:

The 1927 flood was a torrent ten feet deep the size of Rhode Island: it was thirty-six hours coming and four months going; it was deep enough to drown a man, swift enough to upset a boat, and lasting enough to cancel a crop year.

William Alexander Percy, a poet and gentleman planter, was chairman of the Flood Relief Committee and the Red Cross for Mississippi. The flood was the most colossal event in his genteel way of life. It hit him hard, as it hit the hundreds of thousands of black farmers who became refugee campers during the flood and later swelled the Great Migration to the north. That flood was all-consuming.

I consider the words a sentence, even though it makes three independent predications or statements. If a writer separates predications with semicolons, he doesn’t want us mentally to drop our pitch and then pause for a breath as if we have come to a period, but rather to gather all the words in one bite.

The sentence opens the chapter called “The Flood of 1927” in Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son. How does a writer specify the dimensions of “the greatest flood in American history” (Not really true) in one sentence? In the first predication he gives us one word from his list of synonyms for large: “torrent,” which, of course, is a synonym for flood and suggests both “horror” and “terror.” Wise choice. Also he picks number terms for size and, in the second predication, duration. Duration suggests the slow or fast onset depending on one’s engagement with the flood, and then the lingering departure and release, suggesting the human suffering that had to be endured.

The final predication gets to the point of the chapter, the significance of the flood to Percy, director of flood relief. If George Bush had had a director of flood relief in the Katrina flood of New Orleans as humane and capable as Percy, his ratings would not have sunk so low. Proper to his role in the flood, Percy makes his point with telling understatement. “Enough” is just the right estimate of the amount and kind of damage caused in three dimensions. Three “enoughs” suggests that the flood had any additional number of dimensions.

Percy’s “Flood of 1927” is a worthy complement to William Faulkner’s 1927 flood story “Old Man,” written from the perspective of a convict rather than an aristocratic poet.

LOUIS SULLIVAN: The Apostrophic Sentence

Sullivan’s Autobiography of an Idea traces his life as a developing architect, his education, training, and goal as an architect. He arrives at the “Idea” at the end of the book: form follows function. He saw himself as an artist and his idea as the artist’s guiding principal. Our sentence, windy and orotund, is what classically is known as an apostrophe, a salute to a dead hero. It was Michelangelo, the supreme artist he saw as his spiritual mentor.

The man, the man of super-power, the glorified man of whom he prophesied in his childhood, as he watched his big, strong men build stone walls, hew down trees, drive huge horses – his mighty men, his heroes, his demi-gods, a powerful presentiment which he had seen and felt in the glory of the sunrise; which he had heard in the voice of spring; and which, personified through the haze of most mystical romantic trances, he had faith in – that faith which is near its source and secure.

Try to ignore the grandiloquent style of the sentence and appreciate the eager, blooming young man Sullivan remembers through his romantic trance in his old age. In 1879 at age twenty-two, he was in Paris getting educated. He knew he wanted to become an architect, but he wasn’t sure he could be a true artist as an architect. Do I have an eye for the beautiful? He was determined to know that he had the proper eye. He had read in the work of the great critic Hippolyte Taine that Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling was a masterpiece but that the Last Judgment “was obviously done on momentum, as compared with the vigor of the ceiling.” He had to find out, so he went to Rome to check his own eye with that of Taine. “It was easy – oh, so easy!” He spent two days in the Sistine Chapel “in a supreme moment of relief.” Now, at the very end of his life, he was writing about the founding moment of his career.

This sentence has no main verb. I call it a sentence because that’s the way he wrote it. No predication. But it ends with a period. The apostrophe could have ended with an apostrophe mark. Taken out of the context of Sullivan’s life, the words are a fulsome, romantic indulgence that would be dismissed immediately by a modern editor. At the same time Sullivan wrote this, Harold Ross was about to launch The New Yorker, “not for the old lady from Topeka.” I am convinced that the tone of the sentence is not out of keeping with Sullivan’s purpose, remembering the ecstasy of his youth. Why not indulge extravagantly in these exclamations? Why not write an old fashioned apostrophe to his hero Michelangelo?

By its nature an apostrophe is repetitious, a series of phrases, each one expanding tone and content of the previous one. Keeping the form of the apostrophe, he conveys a synopsis of his youthful aspirations. First he salutes Michelangelo of his childish dreams, who is personified in the working men he had idolized as he watched them change the landscape of Boston with their big muscles. He sees them now through the imagery of Walt Whitman in a romantic trance as a presentiment of the future, which he had faith in.

Was Sullivan completely naive when he wrote his autobiography? What was his self-knowledge? He knew that his epiphany in the Sistine Chapel was a romantic trance. He knew that being in the very presence of his hero’s masterpiece was real: he was at the source of his faith in himself. Again the last word is fittingly conclusive. He is “secure” in his career as an architect. The sentence has given us an intimate view of a crucial moment in the revolution of architecture that Louis Sullivan was central in creating.

EUDORA WELTY: The Words Upon Words Sentence

Before looking at this sentence, we should look at another one from the same book, One Writer’s Beginnings (1983) by Eudora Welty, one of the great American short story writers (in that good old Library of American Literature): “Learning Latin (once I was free of Caesar) fed my love for words upon words, words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober accretion of a sentence.” What better definition of a sentence – words upon words, accretion.

So a sentence builds on some beginning words. Linguists may argue about where a sentence begins, but we can sensibly accept the idea that the sentence begins somewhere in the completed, accretive sentence. I call it the kernel, the simple elements of the declarative sentence that the final sentence is built upon:

In “the library,” inside the mission-style bookcase with its three diamond-latticed glass doors, with my father’s Morris chair and the glass-shaded lamp on its table beside it, were books I could soon begin on – and I did, reading them all alike and as they came, straight down their rows, top shelf to bottom.

In Welty’s sentence, the kernel would be “Books are in the library.” The elements are the subject, the verb, and for the verb in this sentence the necessary adverb phrase. Before we find words upon words, these elements are transformed so that the adverb phrase comes first. Why did Welty write it that way? “Books (that) I could begin on” would be rather incomprehensible and surely less focused than the way she did it.

When Welty said “words in continuation and modification,” she was speaking of what grammarians call coordination and subordination. All of her accretions except two are subordinate elements, elements that modify others, that make specifications about others. The other two are coordinate elements following “and.”

Each modifier answers a specific question:

Where in the library? Inside the bookcase.

What style of bookcase? Mission style.

How is the bookcase designed? With doors.

What are the doors made of? Glass.

How are the doors designed? With lattices.

What shape are the lattices? Diamond.

How many doors are there? Three.

What things are near the bookcase? A chair and a table.

And so on – a lot of modifiers in this typical sentence. A single sentence may carry an infinite number of modifiers. Another modifier can always be added. The final major element in her sentence, the continuation or coordinating element following a dash, is an interesting stylistic variation. The dash is like a pause before something she wants to emphasize. The “did” is especially emphatic, like “I DID begin on them.” The sentence ends with the image of the girlish Eudora picking up one book after another indiscriminately and reading until she finished the entire collection. One can imagine her gulping down accretion after accretion, marveling at how they formed beautiful paragraphs and books.

AMIRI BARAKA: The Comma Fault Sentence

Some English teachers and even some editors would correct the next sentence because of a glaring error. The error is called “comma fault” and means that two complete sentences have been separated by a comma instead of a period. So what? One could easily find hundreds of comma faults in works by esteemed writers. There must be some good reason for writers to commit comma faults. A reputable writer does not publish glaring errors unless he has been victimized by a copy editor. His decision to write a comma fault is deliberate.

Blues means a Negro experience, it is the one music the Negro made that could not be transferred into a more general significance than the Negro gave it initially.

Where Baraka chooses a comma, he might have chosen one of four other marks of punctuation, a colon, a semicolon, a dash, or a period. Or nothing, a “run-on” fault. So he had six choices and he took the comma. I believe he saw six possible different meanings among these choices. Baraka is a poet and I assume that he makes very fine discriminations in meanings. But what meaning is the reader supposed to get? The readers of his book, Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed From It, may not have the fine discrimination he has.

Let me say what I get. Keeping in mind his title for the book, I see a people who are like no other; in White America they have an emotional life that they call “blues.” In White America, no other people have that life. Out of that life, they developed an emotional music they also called “blues.” The life and the music have the same quality. The comma expresses that sameness, it links the life and the music inseparably. A comma maintains that link. (Notice that I just used the comma fault for about the same reason.) A period would separate them. It would make the first part of the sentence a definition of “blues.” But Baraka says they can’t be separated in any good definition of “blues.” A period would be wrong.

In British English, a period is called a “full stop.” An accurate term logically, phonetically, grammatically. The sentence is over with. It broke off. It’s finished. A period in Baraka’s sentence would mean to me that the White World “without a Negro experience” can “transfer” the music into a “general significance.” No indelible link between Negro blues life and Negro blues music. I see a subtle meaning of the comma. On the street, it would be expressed directly: White man can’t sing the blues. That comma fault is not only racially controversial; it neatly raises the whole problem of black identity. Baraka’s book is essentially about that.

W. H. AUDEN: The Conjunction Sentence

Two ways of setting up words in a series concern the word “and.” It’s a subtle point. Let me illustrate with a simple example. Compare these two sentences:

Wright built many buildings, churches, banks, houses, and hotels.

Wright built many buildings, churches, banks, houses, hotels.

Read them aloud and you’ll hear that “hotels” has a different sound in the two sentences. With “and” the sentence has a concluding tone: Wright built four kinds of buildings, no more. But without the “and,” the concluding tone suggests that he built more than four kinds, any number more.

The sentence by W. H. Auden is much more complex: two different series are different in length, a series of single words in the first and nouns with modifiers in the second. The first does not use “and,” but the second does. The sentence preceding provides context for ours:

The frightful falsehood which obsessed the Greeks and Romans and for which mankind has suffered ever since, was that government is a similar activity to art, that humans are a medium like language out of which the gifted politician creates a good society as the gifted poet creates a good poem. A society which really was like a poem and embodied all the esthetic values of beauty, order, economy, subordination of detail to the whole effect, would be a nightmare of horror, based on selective breeding extermination of the physically or mentally unfit, absolute obedience to its rector, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars.

Auden, a renowned poet, would be an authority on the values of poetry. He knows all about what makes a good poem. He lists only four qualities, but he could list more. The lack of “and” suggests that he could go on and on, as undoubtedly he did on other occasions. Four was enough to make his point. But the second series uses “and” in a resounding conclusion.

Auden’s sentence rebukes Shelley’s pronouncement that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” His use of “and” concluding the second series and the sentence emphasizes the utter absurdity of Shelley’s statement. We can accept Auden’s statement or not: I respect his audacity, his perception, and his skill.

RANDOLPH BOURNE: The Sardonic Sentence: War EZRA POUND: The Ironic Sentence: Poetry

Born in almost the same year, Randolph Bourne (1885) and Ezra Pound (1886) were both literary figures and both were deeply affected by war. Bourne was known for his pacifist writings during World War I and Pound for his traitorous writings during World War II. Apparently they never met.

Both Bourne and Pound are credited with famous, terse statements that ironically define war and poetry:

Bourne: War is the health of the state.

Pound: Poetry is news that stays news.

I encountered Bourne’s statement about war in John Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A. when I was in college. His image of Bourne has never left me: “a tiny twisted unscared ghost . . . crying out in a shrill soundless giggle: War is the health of the state.” As for Pound, I inherited a copy of ABC of Reading from my English Professor, Thomas Beyer. I found that sentence in the small book and recognized the truth of it.

Irony is the key to both sentences. “Health” and “poetry” are ostensibly defined in the statements’ complements of the verb “is.” In Bourne’s sentence, “state” means the organization of the herd wanting protection. The people become obedient, trustful, respectful children naively accepting the protection of their mother, the state. The governing classes, having assumed power, foster the belief that the state knows best, that the subjects must relinquish their individuality and follow the herd. “Health” must have been a precious word for Bourne; born with a grotesque face and the stature of a hunchbacked dwarf, he was never healthy and died young in the flu epidemic of 1918. (The flu hit me too, but I was a baby, healthy enough to survive.) His description of the state linked with “health” is the irony of the sentence. The state in war is diseased.

Pound’s irony is not born of hatred but of love. Pound was the most influential friend of many poets at the time that modernist poetry arrived. He has been thought of as the founder of modernist poetry, especially Imagist poetry. He helped many poets get published and helped them with his own editing. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” owes much to Pound. Pound did not hate “news” of course, as Bourne hated war. But news is always changing, fleeting, and often trivial, incomplete, or untrue. News is not lasting, not beautiful, not humane. Poetry is eternal and is also new for the reader, new insights, new truths, new visions. And it stays that way.

Irony for me distinguishes good writing from dull, plodding writing. Irony is sophisticated, intelligent, interesting. Good writers perceive nuances in meaning, two sides or more to every question. Their ironic words in both fiction and nonfiction provide a larger world of thought, a drama of words combating each other. Not every sentence can be ironic, but the language itself offers inevitable ironic choices.

MARGUERITE YOUNG: The Dragnet Sentence

If you Google Marguerite Young, you will be treated to the most generous treatment of a writer that I have ever seen. Biography, pictures, reviews, personal recollections by friends and students; one of her pictures was taken by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She was a native of Indiana and during most of her life she was a teacher in New York in colleges, universities, restaurants, parks, street corners, everywhere. I almost met her, but I didn’t get the job I applied for with my new Ph.D. She was teaching at Rockford College in Illinois, and I had read her book and thought she would be a neat colleague.

I found the title of this analysis in a Google sketch. It said she invented the term. It fits our sentence perfectly. I had thought of calling this analysis “Expressive Chaos,” but her own words are much better. The sentence looks chaotic, but it is more a cosmos than a mess, an expressive cosmos, an orderly arrangement.

The great joker in the philosophic pack was God, was man, was everything, was cancer, was an octoroon, was a golden rose, was a pig’s snout, was Jessie, was a billiard ball, was a maze, was an empty headed doll, was ostrich eggs, was Napoleon, was a cherry tree, was a rectangle, was mountains, was nature, was human nature, was Fanny Wright’s old party, was a table, was a chair, was Saint Ursula, was Chicksauga, was a brain fever, was happiness, was an acorn, was blocks of populace, was an albatross on the banks of the Wabash far away, was Marmaluke.

Marguerite Young’s book Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias is a history of a German pietist’s sect founding Father Rapp’s Utopia community in New Harmony, Indiana. When that group moved elsewhere, the town was bought by Robert Owen, the wealthy, idealistic Welsh reformer. When my wife and I visited New Harmony, we spoke to the manager of a store, asking him if harmony still prevailed in the community. “Nah, it’s all business and politics now.” We enjoyed the place, especially the motel with its Shaker-like furniture and no TV.

Most of the book, rather than narrative history, is taken up with rhetorical exploration of the subject in all its manifestations. The subject is rich with images, personalities, philosophical and religious and political positions, the entire content of the social history and history of ideas. Young chooses to deal with most of it. Her method is, as it must be, to cover the vast area, allusive, metaphoric, and symbolic.

The reader must give her sentence the attention required of reading a poem. (Young was a poet and novelist.) Our sentence is not as elegant as it is daring. The list of items, nouns in a series, complements of “was,” does not use “and.” The series is infinite. Series can be organizing, classifying, or random. Our sentence uses the random series, without “and,” an appropriate rhetorical device suggesting an infinitely various and unorganized universe. The items come from chaos but they lead to cosmos. The sentence is in the mind of Robert Dale Owen, the founder’s son. The sentence reflects his confusion in his last days contemplating his and New Harmony’s future in his benumbed mind. He was drunk much of the time.

Some of the items, God, a golden rose, the maze, refer to Father Rapp’s Utopia, others to the ideals of Robert Owen the founder, man, nature, blocks of populace, a rectangle. The reader may object to Young taking the easy way out, just stringing together these random beads and forcing the reader to create his own summary statement. The rhetorical device of the random series gives the reader free rein to create his own ironies. The book is delightfully ironic. My thought of naming this analysis “Chaos in Harmony” is ironic but it doesn’t suggest cosmos, which I find in “The Dragnet Sentence.”

LEWIS THOMAS: The Creative Ambiguity Sentence

When Lewis Thomas was asked to contribute short essays to a medical journal, he accepted the offer gladly because it gave him a chance to break away from the “relentlessly flat style required for absolute unambiguity in every word.” The essay from which our sentence is drawn has high praise for ambiguity. It is what makes humanity different from other species. Our sentence captures that idea in great style.

If it were not for the capacity for ambiguity, for the sense of strangeness, that words in all languages provide, we would have no way of recognizing the layers of counterpoint in meaning and we might be spending all our time sitting on stone fences staring into the sun.

The essay from which the sentence is drawn is in his famed book The Lives of a Cell. Thomas was a physician and a scientist and a philosopher and a poet and essayist. I had the good fortune of learning about this book from my colleague Ken Macrorie, who relished good style and loved to teach it. He, like many critics, praised Thomas’s style. When Ken told me that Thomas was a scientist and physician, I hesitated. I didn’t have time or interest in reading a book of science. How wrong I was! Thomas is my kind of writer, clear, humorous, precise in his use of words, metaphorical in explaining difficult ideas. A style with life in it. This is my favorite sentence in this book.

The essay “Communication” repeats the idea of our sentence in many ways. Thomas wanted to bridge the gap between the specialist’s and the non-specialist’s knowledge; redundancy was necessary. Thomas reveals a shrewd familiarity with the principles of communication and modern linguistics. He writes, “The capacity to recognize syntax, to organize and deploy words into intelligible sentences is innate in the human mind.” Chomsky could not have said it as well. Thomas’s hobby was studying etymology, the histories of words.

Both this sentence and the one I am going to analyze make shocking revelations about the nature of language and the nature of the human mind. He leads up to our sentence with observations about honeybees and the lymphocyte. Wikipedia defines lymphocytes as “a type of white blood cell in the vertebrate immune system.” (What would I do without Google?) Both the bee and the cell have the power of discrimination. The bee discriminates between sugar and non-sugar, the lymphocyte between the polymers (Wow! Google told me more than I could handle.) that match its receptor and those that do not match. Extremely minimal discrimination. With their primitive sensitivity, bees and lymphocytes can zero in on only one thing. The bee finds honey and the lymphothing enlarges, making new DNA, and turns into a “blast.” (Google it yourself.) There are no shades of meaning in what cells and bees sense, no ambiguity.

The human mind, on the other hand, senses much of its world through words, which are innately ambiguous. Hence comes the magic of language, the “sensing of strangeness” we feel when a single word points us to more than one meaning. I call our sentence shocking because it challenges our education in speech and writing: Always be clear, just one meaning, don’t be vague, don’t be ambiguous. Thomas’s phrase “layers of counterpoint” demonstrates the very point he is making. Both nouns are metaphorical, “layer” suggesting a patterned form of structure and “counterpoint” suggesting a conversation between two melodies. When they are used together, sparks of creative ambiguity light up and produce new meanings. The resonance and reverberations lead far away from the kind of ambiguity we find in the synonyms in a thesaurus: obscurity, obtuseness, equivocation.

The crowning beauty of the sentence lies in the concluding phrase “staring into the sun.” It alludes to an image of the honeybee a few sentences earlier. “When a bee is tracking sugar by polarized light, observing the sun as though consulting his watch, he does not veer away to discover an unimaginable marvel of a flower.” The roving, receptive eye of the human being, on the other hand, is creatively sensitive even when it is only staring. Our sentence helps bridges the gap that separates us from the bee.

GORE VIDAL: The Bag of Tricks Sentence

If you have seen Gore Vidal in a TV program where he is discussing something with some other people, you know he is an iconoclast with an aggressive manner who loves to taunt with his sardonic intelligence anyone who disagrees with him. Our sentence is from his book The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992). Without challenging his idea, I want to look at some rhetorical devices of a writer who likes to play with words.

Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for many there is no time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of fictions, intended, like the avowed commercials, to keep docile huddled masses, keep avid for products addled consumers.

First is his simple repetition of words “Time to spare” – “no time,” “news – news – news.” He doesn’t hesitate to call attention to words as words. Writers try to avoid unnecessary and distracting repetition. Vidal goes so far as to employ alliteration from his bag of tricks, “flashing fictions.” He uses the adjectives “huddled” and “addled” in the final construction with parallel infinitive verbs “keep.” Simple repetition contributes to unity, binding together parts of a sentence or parts of a paragraph in the way an echo of a voice binds together the parts of an auditory experience. “Addled” echoes “huddled” the same way vowel sounds echo in what’s called assonance. When Frank in “Educating Rita” demonstrates assonance with an allusion to the “swans” and “stones” in a poem by Yeats, Rita says, “Oh, is that it? Getting the rhyme wrong.”

Why did Vidal write “keep docile masses” and “keep avid consumers” instead of “keep masses docile” and “keep consumers avid”? I think it was more of his playfulness with words but also his knowing that “keep” is in a special category of verbs that allows putting the adjective after the verb. Not so with other categories. “Paint white the house” is not English. Nor is “Get warm the baby.”

“Addled” and “huddled” are in a better position for their effect the way Vidal does it. It was risky for Vidal to use challenging syntax as well as alliteration. Maybe he had in mind expressing ironically and playfully the too-ordinary idea of the sentence. The devoted iconoclast is not satisfied with an easy target.

I don’t recommend Vidal’s tricks with language as a way of improving your style, but I hope you gain an appreciation for the vast number of choices the language offers a writer.

E. B. WHITE: The How to Write a Good Sentence

E. B. White is known for three works, his writing in The New Yorker and other magazines, his stories for children, Stuart Little, and Charlotte’s Web featuring a mouse and a spider, and my book’s rival, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. I spent a couple days in the hospital recently and was cared for by several young nurses and other caregivers, including an Iranian-American medical student (MS) whose name disappeared in my deaf ear. We had a long conversation and when he asked me what my occupation was and I said I was writing a book, he became highly interested.

MS: What’s it about?

Me: Style, literary style.

MS: Like Strunk and White?

Me: Yeah, sort of.

MS: I really like that book, it’s a great book.

Me: Are you interested in writing?

MS: I hope to write stories some day.

Me: Have you read Teaching Lolita in Tehran?

MS: Not yet, but I will when I have time.

The conversation went on. Best time I ever had in a hospital. I was amazed that a medical student was an admirer of Strunk and White. It gave me hope that my manual would appeal to a general audience.

E. B. White was a gifted teacher with his book. His tens of thousands of students were lucky to read his advice. I find it demonstrated in our sentence and I’ll show a beginning writer how to do it.

In twenty minutes they give me back my car and I pass through the doorway into the crisp world away from the oasis of love and dreams of fair women – a man with a smooth-running engine, beside the Shalimar.

First there is the plain language. Don’t use fancy language, even language that is too grammatically perfect. Instead of saying, “They return my vehicle” or “They give my car back to me” say “They give me back my car.” That sounds appropriately informal. Plain English. Use appropriate precision. Don’t say “nineteen-and-a-half minutes” or “about twenty minutes” or “a few minutes.” Say, “twenty minutes.” That’s a real number, not exact and not vague. You don’t have to be exact or sound as if you want to be exact, you just want to sound alert to your circumstances. Don’t use several words for a simple idea, find the right word. Don’t say, “into the world of bright, cold winter.” All you’re trying to do is contrast the atmosphere of the outside with the atmosphere inside the garage. The right word is “crisp.”

Furthermore, when you want to describe the feel of your car that has just been tuned up, don’t describe it as the mechanic would with technical detail. Just use words that express your own limited knowledge of tune‑ups and suggests your satisfaction with the mechanic’s job. Say “a smooth-running engine.”

Now you can round this piece off with allusions to what you said earlier in the piece. The image of the mechanic’s radio playing softly a romantic tune sung by a baritone: “Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar.” It’s passionate love. “I don’t know where the Shalimar is. Perhaps Persia. Love, riding the waves of warmth from the stove, takes possession of me. I see a girl of breathtaking loveliness. Her hands are Persian and pale.” The mechanic’s greasy hands are adjusting the points on your distributer. “The stove and the music create a moment of perfect contentment of mind and body . . .” Sound nostalgic for the days of your youth, but don’t overdo the sentimentality. “Oasis of love and dreams of fair women” should do it. Your readers won’t miss the touch of irony in the voice of a middle-aged man.

Finally, conclude the piece with our sentence, the image of a man happy with his car and happy with his dreams of Shalimar, a word he doesn’t care to know the meaning of, a word that is still echoing from the radio. If our beginning writer has taken care of all these points, all he has to do is borrow E. B. White’s eyes and ears and temperament, share his angle of vision, and live through his life’s experience. Then he’ll have it made, and even Strunk won’t find anything wrong with his sentences.

TONY HILLERMAN: The Essence Sentence

If you have visited Santa Fe, New Mexico, can you explain what the essence of the city is? All I remember are the architecture of the buildings and the hot food. We visited Santa Fe when my daughter Ingrid lived there; we saw no essence nor ate any of it. Tony Hillerman quotes a Nigerian journalist, Cletus Xywanda visiting the city. The quote ends the sketch in The Great Taos Bank Robbery (1973). Hillerman thought the Xywanda quote gave the essence: “But Santa Fe celebrates the individual.” Not much essence in that skimpy line. Ingrid’s statement is much better: “Santa Fe is Old Spain in the new world.” She’s a thinker and a writer. She thinks “Old Spain” and “new world” stand for the Hispanics, the Spanish language, Hispanic food, the Indian culture and languages, the Indian arts and crafts, and the Anglo’s business, industry, politics, and English language. Hillerman’s own sentence is as follows:

It has something to do with the best of the women’s club’s naming itself “The Stitch and Bitch Club,” something to do with the good-natured insolence of the plaza shoeshine boys, and something to do with the cynical civic attitude toward growth and progress – which Santa Feans view with no more enthusiasm than a milking goat has for cold hands.

Nothing about the ethnic roots of the town, but his casual style captures Santa Fe’s behavior in a humorous way. Noting that the real essence is “invisible,” and that it “can’t be communicated through adjectives,” he simply takes some stabs at it with “something to do with” and examples of human behavior and attitude, human quirks and thoughts.

Hillerman was a journalist and professor of journalism. I’ll bet he didn’t allow his students to get away with “something to do with.” Good advice, usually, but in his sketch, the phrase allows him to expand the sentence casually. He keeps the reader going. Tell us more about those raunchy women, that picturesque busy plaza, that cynical attitude, that poor goat.

JOHN MCPHEE: The Every Word Counts Sentence

The sentence by John McPhee, from Giving Good Weight (1986) is one of the shortest in my collection, six words with a full cargo of meaning and suggestion in each word. McPhee is admired for his accurate and live reports on just about everything: freight transportation, trucks, Bill Bradley the basketball star, body development for weightlifting, geology, oranges, Alaska, tennis players, the pine barrens of New Jersey. Our sentence is about onions.

The fallout quickened appetites in Greece.

He has visited an onion farm and is surprised to find that the soil is so rich it will burn. In 1964, “a couple of thousand acres” burned. “It was harvest time and crated onions were stacked across the plain. Fifteen million onions roasted.” Then comes our sentence, an obvious exaggeration no harder to believe than the factual statements preceding it, which the reader is expected to believe without question, no matter how incredible they seem. The sentence has the simple job of suggesting the great size of the fire. As a reporter, McPhee could easily have gathered eye-witness accounts and lively quotes. Instead we get six words of poetry that do the job completely.

The whole sentence is a complex metaphor made up of several “as if” elements. The fire produces as‑if “fallout,” suggesting nuclear, something resulting from human error. (“Now and then a farmer will flick a cigarette off his rig and start a ground fire.”) Like Chernobyl, something potentially disastrous over a wide area. “Fallout” takes care of the size of the fire in ways that no eye-witness account could have done with any number of inflated statistics and expressions of amazement.

But “fallout” goes further by suggesting what happens after the fire. McPhee is dealing with onions, not atomic energy. For us, onions don’t burn, they roast. And they give off a fragrance that promises a wonderful meal. Roast onions don’t merely stimulate appetites, they quicken them. The perfect word that colors the aroma with ecstatic yearning. No disaster from this fallout. The fragrance of roasting onions is one of the supreme human pleasures.

A further contrast is provided by the phrase that concludes the sentence. Where should we imagine these quickened appetites are to suggest the scope of the fragrance? The appetite for onions being universal on the planet, McPhee could put the onions anywhere. Put them far away in the time dimension. Put them in Ancient Greece. Onions there were so quickening to the appetites they were used as aphrodisiacs. If the reader wants to check McPhee’s propriety, he’ll find appetite for onions in Homer and Plato.

PAUL GRUCHOW: The (In)Transitive Verb Sentence

I met this writer over thirty years ago at a meeting. We had lunch together and an interesting conversation. He had just published his first and only book at that time, Journal of a Prairie Year (1986). So I bought a copy and wrote to a friend about him. I wrote, “He’s a really good writer, but he’s not famous – yet.” I Googled him and found that he had committed suicide after suffering from depression and that he had written four other books, and been a newspaper editor and a teacher of writing at two Minnesota colleges.

All of his books are about conservation and wilderness. He became known as a conservationist more than a writer, not fulfilling my prediction that he would become a famous writer. Reading his sentence now convinces me that he deserved to be a very famous writer. Our sentence shows his facility.

I was born at mid-century. My parents, who were poor and rural, had never amounted to anything, and never would, and never expected to. They were rather glad for the inconsequence of their lives. They got up with sun and retired with it. In summer they tended; in fall they harvested; in winter they repaired; in spring they planted. It had always been so; so it would always be.

The statements in the passage are plain and blunt. So is the rhythm. Like the lives of his parents, his sentences are routine and unpretentious. Well, not really: all good sentences have pretensions. These sentences pretend to be routine and not to amount to anything. Our sentence is composed of four predications with exactly the same surface structure: an adverb phrase + subject + intransitive verb. I would call a verb intransitive if there is no object. (She waved.) Some verbs, like wave, can be either. (She waved her arm.) And some verbs to be grammatical must not have objects. “Die” is the best example of an immutably intransitive verb. Gruchow wanted all four of his verbs to be intransitive so he mutated two transitive verbs. He twisted the grammar of “tended” and “repaired” to sustain the rhythm of the short predications. The sentence would lose its strong beat if he had written “tended their crops and animals” and “repaired their buildings and fences and machines.”

Our sentence is the nucleus of the paragraph quoted above. The paragraph features repetition and slight trimming of the grammar. Notice the repetition of “so” in the final sentence and how Gruchow varies its position. He takes advantage of several features of grammar that have optional choices. In our sentence, he invents a new option, enlarging the list of intransitive verbs. Superior writers earn the privilege of breaking the rules.

WRIGHT MORRIS: The Past Perfect Sentence

I was on a photography kick one semester teaching a seminar on American Realism. I was also teaching freshman writing and assigned students to find photographs of people and to write descriptions that would communicate to the reader the same sensations that the picture had given him, not a review of the picture but a translation of the picture into words. They would have to look hard and write with great care. Some of the papers were gems, but some students didn’t understand the assignment. They didn’t know how to look at a photograph.

Wright Morris’s novel The Home Place is a most unusual novel. You have to both read and look at it because it is half photographs and half text. The setting is a farm. Half the pages are full page pictures of farm life: people, animals, buildings, activities. Beautiful pictures – Morris was an artist. The pictures didn’t illustrate the story; they suggested the scene and the reader had to figure out which details were translated into Morris’s words.

I chose the book because I thought it would raise interesting questions about realism. Which pages are more real? Some of the students thought Morris should have made it all text. Others loved the pictures and made discerning observations about the art of photography, how a picture can suggest a scene as realistically as words. My seniors were learning the same skills as my freshmen.

Our sentence is from Morris’s memoir of his life in Europe as a young man just out of college, American Dreamer in Europe: 1933–1934 (1983). Morris is spending a year in Europe to find himself. What he found one day in Vienna as he looked out the window at a garden below was a blint Garden where blind people came to walk the symmetrical gravel paths, counting their steps, and turning right or left at the corners.

On one occasion I saw several couples marching as if to unheard music, I was witness to a parable. I realized, with many nuances and meanings a visual metaphor that I found exciting. What I had seen from the window would prove – over the next fifty years – to be inexhaustible each time I looked.

Morris saw this scene many times – but surely not for fifty years. It was inexhaustible in his mind for fifty years. His memory saw the scene through a window, and for fifty years more and more meanings were aroused by the details in the picture. Think of the time and place of this parable: Vienna, Mussolini threatening, the Anschluss, Hitler preparing for war, Pearl Harbor, and all the rest of it. He remembered the picture in Vienna often and found inexhaustible the “visual metaphor” – blindness, the determined marching, the “Deutschland Uber Alles” military chorus music, together with “couples,” memories of companionship and love.

“What I had seen” obviously refers to an instant in the completed past – the past perfect tense, “had” rather than “have.” If he had written “have,” the sentence would make no sense. He had seen and would see for fifty years a parable, which exists outside of tense. He doesn’t use the fashionable word “epiphany,” popularized by James Joyce as a secular sudden intuition, but it sounds like such an experience.

“From the window” is a most important concept for Morris, the photographer and literary artist. A framed image is an art object. For the rest of his life, in words and in pictures, Morris would see parables – symbols and art objects – when his eye and mind perceived real objects.

Some twenty years after I had taught that class – and retired – I had a parable of my own. I was caught short by a word that came up a few times in Morris’s novel. The word as printed was “air-suds.” The students couldn’t figure it out, and I was embarrassed to have to admit that I didn’t know either. My embarrassment had stayed with me for years. That word wouldn’t go away. But one day it hit me: “Air-suds” was “Ersatz,” the German word for fake – fake candy, fake cloth and leather, fake meat and beer, fake everything that Hitler’s German producers made to substitute for the real stuff. My epiphany brought back the whole war.

SELDEN RODMAN: The Quotation Sentence

Rodman was a wealthy, talented groupie who travelled the world seeking contact with famous artists. The book from which our sentence is taken is Conversations with Artists (1961). The artists in this book number about thirty-five, including Tobey, Pollock, Shawn, Hopper, Lawrence, Lipchitz, Calder and Wyeth. Our sentence is from his conversation with Frank Lloyd Wright:

He recalled having related to him how Louis Sullivan had once characterized Richardson’s architecture as “great desire on the part of one who is not particular what girl he sleeps with” and Stanford White’s as that of “one who is very particular about the girls without having much desire” and that he himself had added that Mies van der Rohe’s style managed to dispense with the girls entirely, and that Philip had laughed heartily.

When a writer’s job is to report conversations he has had with people who tell what other people have said, there are problems keeping straight who is talking. The writer doesn’t want to put words in the wrong mouths.

The situation here is like this:

1. Rodman tells the reader what Wright told him. (Exposition, no quotes, no “that”)

2. Wright told Rodman what Johnson had told him. (Indirect quotation, “how”)

3. Johnson told Wright something. (Direct quotation, “characterized as”)

4. Louis Sullivan told somebody something. (Direct quotation, quotes)

5. Wright told Johnson something. (Indirect quotation, “that.”)

More complicated than Studs Terkel’s reports of his conversations. Terkel made the reader assume that these were the actual remarks that went into his tape recorder. Only one person is talking. Oral historians leave out the quotes: their quotations are so thoroughly edited to convey the speaker’s meaning truthfully that quotation marks would be like telling yourself a white lie, pointless.

Rodman had to decide when to quote directly or indirectly. He wanted to be clear and he wanted to be graceful. “That” is the question, when to use it to introduce a noun clause. Noun clauses are used like nouns, subjects or objects of verbs. (That he lied is obvious. I know that he lied. Something is obvious. I know something. “How” and a few other words also can introduce noun clauses.) Fitting noun clauses into very complex sentences can be like herding sheep into separate pens, some to be dipped, some sheared, some butchered.

The problem can be unwieldy, but Rodman’s sentence is graceful and effective. He wants to preserve the flavor of Wright’s remarks without getting tangled up or misleading. He had to deal with remarks within remarks within remarks. I’ve had to talk like the punctilious rabbi again in order to demonstrate that the conventions of punctuation and the mechanism of sentence construction are powerful tools of communication. Does the writer have to deal with them consciously? No, he uses common sense and sentence sense. The whole point of the sentence is to communicate some funny things architects have said about other architects. The only problem for the writer is to make sure each number in the scheme above is clear.

WOODY GUTHRIE: The Rhetorical Question Sentence

Rhetoricians say that a rhetorical question is already an answer, or is too obvious to need an answer, or is a framework for the forthcoming answer. Our sentence is of the last type: Woody Guthrie’s summary of the two main aspects of his artistic life, why he attracted people and artistic offers, and why he refused big offers and fled from them. He was offered a chance to make a movie of his life (that he didn’t live to accept) and these are the big questions he hoped the movie would answer. He looked forward to the answers. Our sentence comes from a letter he wrote about planning the movie. The rhetorical questions had always been real questions.

What is it that he has found that opens all of the doors to him, rolls the rugs out under his feet, and what is it that causes him to answer with a blank look, a sideward glance with a bowed head, or with running, walking, or scrambling away from such offers like out from a sprung trap?

Joe Klein’s Woody Guthrie: A Life (1980) comes as close to answers as we’ll get. Guthrie was attractive to many people, including three wives. Radio station managers hired him, and even a national broadcasting company wanted to give him a job. People liked him and his music, his view of life, his openness to people. He knew he had a special quality. Why did he want to find its name? Why did he want to find the name of the quality that made him reject things others longed for? Put this way, the questions are the deep philosophical questions that have inspired or depressed many artists. Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and recently their son Nick, a scientist, all suffered depression and committed suicide. Woody Guthrie is asking in this sentence Who am I and What is life and How should I live. His biography doesn’t suggest he had suicidal thoughts in spite of tragic facts in his life. Even during his miserable last years in severe illness, there is no hint of depression.

The letter to Irving Lerner ends with a more characteristic Guthrie earthy style: “I will stop now because I can smell Marjorie frying something in the kitchen and I’ve not had no real breakfast yet. Besides we’re going swimming and soak some vitaphones up.” I assume Woody was as creative with the written word as he was with his three thousand songs. “Vitafones” comes from his goofy word-play.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON: The Quoted Sentence

In his day, no American writer was more respected than Ralph Waldo Emerson. He and Ben Franklin have been our most quoted writers. Most of his aphorisms extol nature, self-reliance, and his transcendental ideas. They often sound as if he had intended them to be quoted:

A friend may well be the masterpiece of nature.

A great man is always willing to be little.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

All mankind love a lover.

All diseases run into one – old age.

The last one squares best with my experience. I prefer the aphorisms that have a bite:

A good indignation brings out all one’s powers.

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

I stayed away from the quotable, terse aphorism when I was choosing a good sentence from Emerson. Emerson was a great sentence composer; critics often point out that his style is a collection of great sentences assembled together but with no coherence.

I found a passage in his journals that pleased me no end: “I have more thoughts during and enduring [bad preaching] than at other times. . . . I confess I find some pleasure in the stinging oaths of truckmen and teamsters. Dante knows ‘God damn’ and can be rowdy if he please, and he does please. Miss B___, a mantua maker in Concord became a ‘Medium,’ and gave up her old trade for this one; and is to charge a pistareen for a spasm and nine dollars for a fit.” Sounds more like Mark Twain.

I chose our sentence from Emerson’s best known essay “Self-Reliance.”

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

Emerson is talking about actual travel, the Grand Tour sort of journey that was getting to be popular for Americans at the time. He found no joy in such frivolity. He starts the passage containing our sentence with the more quotable “Travel is a fool’s paradise.” I must admit that when I saw our sentence, I thought of Lucy in “Peanuts,” who went traveling to camp and returned the same day: “When I got there, I found myself, so I came back home.” Emerson played tourist in the first part of our sentence. Lucy was searching for her self. Emerson’s sentence is much deeper. He found himself in Naples, but it was a sad self that he found; he should have stayed home. Yet his self was unchangeable, just as sad at home.

I can only quote from the rest of the essay. There is no sharpening or clarifying or explaining or analyzing Emerson’s thought in words not Emerson’s. He has to speak for himself. “The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home with the soul, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance that he goes . . . and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet.” The lofty tone of this passage lacks the sharpness of our sentence. Emerson quit his church, but he never lost his preachiness.

Yet he can come down to earth in the next breath and lay it out plain:

“He who travels to be amused or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.”

Modeling one’s sentences on Emerson’s is worthwhile. His learning is formidable and his artistry is admirable, but what I like about his sentences is that they hold my attention; they don’t bore and they don’t sound like truisms. They are poetic, always new.

NORMAN MACLEAN: A Beginning Sentence

One way to classify sentences is simply beginning, middle, and end sentences. Beginning sentences are probably mostly done when the writer has finished the piece. How can he introduce the piece before he has seen how it turned out? I’ll bet Norman Maclean didn’t write the perfect first sentence until he had masterfully created the web of themes that his piece is built on. This sentence is from his novella A River Runs Through It (1976).

In my family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.

The catchiness of the sentence needs no comment, but its function in signing the themes of the story deserve careful appreciation. The main themes are the family, fly fishing, religion, and the connections among them in about that order. All of them are clearly developed in the first few pages.

The family is the father, a Presbyterian minister and fly fisherman, two sons, and the mother. The integration of religion and fly fishing, the catchy part of the sentence, lays the foundation of the book. (Note that while it reads like a novel, it is autobiographical of the elder son, Norman.) He tells first about one of his father’s lessons about Jesus’s disciples, that they were fisherman. The boy Norman assumes they were fly fisherman. “Paul and I probably received as many hours of instruction in fishing as we did in other spiritual matters.” The theology was Presbyterian and so was the fishing. “Isaac Walton is no respectable writer,” the father taught. “He was an Episcopalian and a bait fisherman.”

Maclean sums up his father’s theology, directly parallel with proper fishing. “To him, all good things – trout as well as eternal salvation – comes by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.” Maclean works word magic in this sentence that links trout and salvation. “Grace” is conveniently ambiguous so that it can refer to both fishing and religion and blur the line between them, making the point of our sentence. God’s redeeming grace, leading to salvation, blends nicely with the graceful art of casting, leading to trout.

I have quoted liberally from the first few pages of the book to show how tightly Maclean weaves the weft of fishing into the warp of religion to fulfill the promise of our sentence. Even recognizing the word magic he tries to put over on us, we have to admire the web he creates.

WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON: A Moving Sentence

The writer is moving in geologic time and place: the movement of earth strata from the Eastern to the Western hemisphere. He stands on a hill in Chase County, Kansas, observing the prairie and its contours that have been shaped by tectonic plate movement and cycles of shifting waters. The big book that William Least Heat-Moon wrote is PrairyErth (A Deep Map), (1991). A “deep map” is an intense exploration of a tiny piece of the planet, looking into its eons of time and its depths of space. The author’s name is a pen name and comes from his Osage heritage, his father having told him that since his older brother was Little Heat-Moon, he was Least Heat-Moon.

The author is always careful to open the reader’s perception to hidden images, to the life and history under and behind modern Kansas. Our sentence shows that even in monotonous Kansas, on the apparently unchanging, empty, flat prairie imperceptible movement is always there. The whole book is a rebuke to Gertrude Stein’s “There’s no there there.” PrairyErth is loaded with there.

In the half century since I was born, this hill has moved at about the rate a fingernail grows, some four feet farther west – about the distance from my heel to my hip – as has everything else around it, the Cottonwood, the courthouse, the brass bedsteads.

The technique of importing remote space-time into the reader’s awareness is what the writer is up to in our sentence. What can be more apt and personal than one’s fingernail or leg? We can understand a fingernail’s growing about an inch a year and appreciate the immense movement over the course of four and a half billion years of the fingernail-sized county in Kansas. When he specifies exactly what has moved he cites three images the reader has already seen, images that have been immobilized while the writer brings them to life.

The images become symbols. The Cottonwood is the river that crosses the county, the symbol of geologic movement as the tectonic plates, the strata, the winds, and the shifting waters shape the landscape. The courthouse is an abrupt change to historic movement as native peoples and wild animals are replaced by European immigrants and domestic animals, and tribal loyalty becomes federal government. The brass bedsteads, the symbol of mass production, modern transportation and communication and modern family lifestyle. The sentence embraces all the dimensions of time and space.

THOMAS P. BEYER: The Extended Metaphor Sentence

Extended metaphor is usually defined as a metaphor that continues into the sentence that follows: My computer died. The funeral will be at the dump. One sentence is a metaphor that continues into the following predication in the same sentence. A better definition would use “predication” rather than “sentence.” My computer died when its hard drive suffered cardiac arrest.

Our sentence is from an essay “Abraham Lincoln – Man of Letters” in the book An Integrated Life (1948) by Thomas P. Beyer, my English Professor at Hamline University. He was also my boss when he hired me as freshman English instructor. Lincoln and Thomas Carlyle were his literary heroes. He loved Lincoln, not as the President who saved the Union and freed the slaves but as the great American literary artist.

He traces Lincoln’s literary writing from his youthful “poems” to his Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses. He says that his debates with Douglas was the arena where Lincoln sharpened all his skills. Douglas, “a man of fine natural ability and immense personal magnetism . . . had no passion for the truth of the spoken word and had not learned the art of appeal through the written word.” Douglas was “a dogmatic, pugnacious bulldog of a man who threw words around with scant respect.” Lincoln used words “scrupulously” Beyer concludes. His description of the two men follow with our sentence:

Douglas was Lincoln’s anvil on which he hammered out the first rude models of his political philosophy; had he been a softer anvil, Lincoln’s steel would not have been so finely tempered.

Beyer’s extended metaphor joins Lincoln and Douglas in a single, complex image. A metaphor as extended as this one dangerously verges on allegory, but the reader is asked not to admire the clever figure of speech but only to appreciate its aptness. The several parts of the metaphor are so common and familiar they are almost dead metaphors. He hammered out his points. Douglas was not a soft opponent. Lincoln had an even temper. Beyer’s art is in so combining the apposite elements in the image of the anvil as to satisfy the contrast of the two men as well as the reality of the figurative language. That’s all. Had he gone any further – fussing with the ember, the heft and clang of the hammer, the muscle of the smith – Lincoln and Douglas would be buried in the rhetoric.

I’d like to write a theme for Tom Beyer while I’m writing about his extended metaphors. When I write, I always try to make my sentences hang together, to have coherence with the entire piece. I repeat words but give them different meanings; I make allusions to things in previous sentences; I extend metaphors. In short, I try to create a web of meaning so that the piece I’m writing has unity and coherence.

In this manual, I insist that the fundamental unit is the sentence, not the word. A sentence has syntactic context and gives each word all the contexts it needs, images and meanings surround it.

If I could write another book, it would be about paragraphs. Most of it would be about the art of transitions, how one sentence leads from and into another sentence. I skirt the subject of transitions in this book when I deal with punctuation because transitions are a vast area that I’m too old to explore. Fortunately others have been there and left some guidelines.

That last sentence is my attempt to demonstrate a point. I chose every word in it very deliberately to show what I mean by transition and extended metaphor.

Fortunately, others have been there and left some guidelines.

The sentence is loaded with metaphors. “Been,” “there,” and “guidelines” are metaphors that echo or extend the metaphors in the previous sentence, “area” and “explore.” “Area” means the two-dimensional size of a surface. It comes from a word meaning “a vacant piece of ground.” When it denotes anything else, it’s a metaphor. “In the area of sociology, class and status are closely related. In the vast area of literary analysis, transitions are related to paragraphs.”

“Been” in this sentence means “existed” and “there” means “in that place.” Put these metaphoric words together and you get extensions of the word “area,” transition from the previous sentence. I worked at our sentence to make it a good sentence, triggered by the word “area.”

Some of you may accuse me of cheating, because I’m using dead metaphors. I agree that some of the words have lost their metaphoric quality to some extent. Nevertheless, some metaphoric life adheres to these old words. “Area” has the smell of “acreage.”

I give you this analysis of my own sentence to prove that it’s possible to create a good sentence deliberately. Of course, you can’t create a good sentence all by itself. It comes during the process of writing the whole piece. I tinkered with it as I wrote: Lots of back-spacing and deleting. But I like the way it turned out. It’s a good sentence. You can do the same. Take Tom Beyer’s advice. Give every word the force of a cannonball.

WILLIAM FAULKNER: The Adjective Sentence

I just Googled “Too many adjectives” to see how this old school-teacher comment at the end of a theme is doing these days. Sure enough, that condemnation of “too many adjectives” is still there to bother beginning writers. I’ve used the comment myself, together with some advice: Be sparing with adjectives, find better ways to describe; adjectives are shortcuts that neglect the texture of an image. I’ve changed my mind.

William Faulkner proved to me that adjectives are not always shortcuts; sometimes they create the texture of a description. I found this sentence in one of my favorite stories, “Spotted Horses” in the novel The Hamlet (1940):

Calico-coated, small-bodied, with delicate legs and pink faces in which their mismatched eyes rolled wild and subdued, they huddled, gaudy, motionless, and alert, wild as deer, deadly as rattlesnakes, quiet as doves.

There are thirteen adjectives among the thirty-two words. In fact, if we look at the structure of the sentence, the framework is only a rack to hang adjectives on. Only three of the adjectives, “delicate,” “pink,” and “mismatched” appear in the conventional position, immediately before the noun. That’s the easy way to use an adjective: just insert it to dress up a noun. The others were not merely inserted, they were part of the original design. The first two – “calico-coated” and “small-bodied” – part of the larger construction with a prepositional phrase (“with . . .) containing a relative clause (“in which . . .”) are sentence modifiers rather than noun modifiers; that is, they establish the intent and tone and direction of the whole sentence, which is a full-bodied description of a herd of horses.

The three noun modifiers merely specify details about separate parts of the horses. “Wild and subdued” are a little unusual in that they follow rather than precede the noun “eyes;” they describe the result of the process denoted by the verb “rolled.” They are not to be taken as ironic antonyms, as we see later when “wild” is associated with deer.

“They huddled” is the main rack of the sentence from which the entire description of the horses is hung, the long sentence modifier before it and a series of six adjectives, also sentence modifiers, following. The sentence modifier at the beginning takes up parts of the horses’ physiques – coats, bodies, legs, faces, and eyes – but the sentence modifier that follows the verb “huddled” describes the general character and personality of the horses. If we reverse the positions of the sentence modifiers, we see how important it was for Faulkner to put them where he did.

The lesson about adjectives that Faulkner taught me in this sentence is not to avoid them but to use them in vital ways. They certainly give life to this sentence. It is not only where he put them but how he chose the right ones to complement one another – wild and subdued; gaudy, motionless, and alert; wild, deadly quiet – that creates these memorable horses. The final metaphor, relating these unbreakable spirits to peaceful doves is Faulkner’s characteristic genius.

MARY MCCARTHY: The Transitional Sentence

How does an intellectual trace the development of her life as an intellectual? Mary McCarthy shows how in her memoir How I Grew. (1987) Our sentence demonstrates that one way to do it is to include “mere detail” of the people who are closest to you. McCarthy’s insistence on remembering precisely certain incidental details about certain people convinces me that we have a true intellectual portrait of one of the major intellectuals of our time. Our sentence doesn’t look it, but it may well be crucial in explaining how she first entered the life of the intellectual.

I had never met a family like this before: the nearest I had come was Aunt Rosie, who played solitaire all night in the downstairs bedroom, lined with signed photographs of opera stars and pianists, and Uncle Mose, who subscribed to The New York Times.

She was recruited into the life of intellectuals by Ted, a girl a year ahead of her at Garfield High School in Seattle. It was Ted’s Jewish family she compares with her Jewish aunt and uncle. McCarthy was Irish Catholic on her late father’s side and Jewish on her late mother’s. The story of her brutalized childhood with Irish relatives has no intellectual elements. Her book Memories of a Catholic Girl (1957) is a classic. Ted had pressed “intellectual” books on her – W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions was the first – and introduced her to the self-styled intellectual group, but our sentence suggests what she was just before she became an intellectual. Our sentence defines the transition in a surprising way. Aunt Rosie and Uncle Mose, New Yorkers isolated in the backwoods of Seattle, nourished some ties with the culture of New York, where McCarthy spent most of her mature life. Her aunt and uncle were not intellectuals, but they were as close as McCarthy could find in her own paternal family of lace curtain Irish stock.

Aunt Rosie would shut herself up in her bedroom and play solitaire all night. I think Mary McCarthy saw Rosie’s intellectual bent in that behavior, a woman applying her intelligence in the purest sense, separate from her personality, from any selfish desires, and getting great pleasure in all-night battles with an abstract puzzle. McCarthy would engage in intellectual battles similarly as she searched for literary and political truth with her cohorts on Partisan Review later. Uncle Mose was a potential intellectual, depending on what news he pursued in The New York Times.

Ted came “of a family of intellectuals” is all we know of her friend’s family, no details. What’s really important in McCarthy’s review of her intellectual development is the baseline she defines in this sentence – “the closest I came” – just barely inside the ring of the intellectuals. Her precision in listing points on the line – “downstairs” bedroom, “signed” photographs, “subscribed” to the Times – is what a novelist can do in one sentence to establish a crucial point in her growth.

WILLIAM BRANN: The Iconoclast Sentence

William Brann, Texas journalist, wrote blistering stories about his town’s hypocrites and poseurs. He is still remembered fondly by liberal writers like the late Molly Ivins. Brann had no schooling, but his writing has flair and the greatest vocabulary of hard words in American journalism. His paper, distributed nationally from Waco, Texas, in the 1890s, had a circulation over 100,000. The paper was named The Iconoclast and was not necessarily liberal. He was a blatant racist. He’s remembered by many, over a hundred years after he was murdered in a street fight.

In a review of a recent biography of Brann, Time magazine quoted him as saying he longed for “a language . . . whose sentences are woven of warp of aspic’s fangs and woof of fire.” He’s fun to read still:

“With more barbaric mummery, flummery and vulgar waste of wealth than characterized even the late Marlborough-Vanderbilt wedding, Nicholas Two-Eyes was crowned Emperor of the rag-tag and bob-tail of creation, officially known as ‘all the Russias.’ Nick has a nice easy job at a salary considerably in excess of ye average country editor, and he gets it all in gold rubles instead of post-oak cord-wood and green watermelons, albeit his felicity is slightly marred by an ever-present fear that he may inadvertently swallow a few ounces of arsenic or sit down on an infernal machine. Nick is emphatically an emperor who emps.”

Brann’s passage above is not typical of his style. He is usually more allusive to Biblical and Classical sources, and his vocabulary requires the largest dictionary in print. Our sentence concerns the rape and abandonment of a Brazilian girl Antonia, whom Baptist missionaries brought back from Brazil to Waco and turned over to Baylor University for religious enlightenment and education. This procedure did not happen. Instead she was relegated to the scullery and studied potatoes instead of Greek roots. At fourteen she was found one day raped and abandoned. President Burleson and his staff denied having anything to do with the matter. When questioned, the girl reluctantly admitted that she had been raped. When asked who had raped her, she pointed to the brother-in‑law of President Burleson’s minister, a young man named H. Steen Morris. To no one’s surprise, Morris got off scot-free.

Our sentence gives Brann’s opinion of Baptists:

The Baptists will continue to send missionaries to Brazil to teach the heterocian heathen what to teach their young daughters and the godly people to rail at prize-fighting as a public disgrace – while Antonia Tiexeira claps her fatherless babe to her childish breast, bedews it with bitter tears and wonders if God knows there is such a place as Texas.

Antonia’s baby died and she disappeared. Brann’s sentence is angry but it is not one of his typical sentences – except for the hard word “heterocian,” which appears in the OED but not in Webster’s Third. Instead, Brann falls back on the vocabulary of the sentimental novel: “claps her fatherless child . . .” Brann had many voices with which to castigate his victims.

JONATHAN RABAN: The Immigrant Sentence

Jonathan Raban is a stylish author of travel books about the United States, who sees himself in the tradition of British literary writers who have come to America and recorded in their often insightful books a wealth of human observation that American writers often miss. Among his many models are Charles Dickens and Robert Lewis Stevenson. Our sentence is from his first book about America Hunting Mr. Heartbreak (1990), which has been followed by several others. Having found his niche audience, Raban has become an American citizen.

In this book, Raban plays the role of one of the millions of American immigrants, particularly, the European immigrant of the nineteenth century – an Irishman, a Swede, a German – who is looking for land, prosperity, respect, and individual freedom, and who expects to see just that as he watches the western horizon from the ship carrying him across the North Atlantic. Raban’s immigrant has just reached the point, Flemish Gap, where he ceases looking back toward his old home as an emigrant and takes a new stance as an immigrant with visions of the promising future:

Somewhere west of Flemish Gap in the North Atlantic Basin, Paradise, Kansas, acquired a barn, a fence, a herd of cows with shitty tails, a log house, a spread table.

The sentence specifies the visions. The immigrant sees Paradise, Kansas, a romantic place to him but ironic to Raban who has noticed a number of places on the American map actually envisioned in such names: Fertile, Eureka, Eden, Harmony, Hopeville, Arcadia. The dreamer on the ship’s rail fills in the picture of Paradise, Kansas, with his postcard list of wishes in Raban’s carefully wrought series.

The immigrant wants to become a farmer with his own farm containing all that is necessary for the comfort and security of his family. Raban puts five items in the vision; the first two are simple, unmodified nouns, the last two nouns are more specific, suggesting the comforts and pleasures of home, and the item in the middle is a specific reality. The image it evokes is Raban’s stroke of genius. The dreaming immigrant is no fool. He knows there will be something rotten in Paradise, Kansas. There will be sweat, mud, weeds, dust, tears, pain, puke, bugs and a hundred other creature discomforts. What image can the writer put in the immigrant’s vision to make it real and accurate? Disease and death are too tragic for a dream, too hard for a real farmer to cope with. But there is one thing a farmer can deal with and knows he will have to deal with – shit. Raban puts shit on the tails of the beautiful herd of cows. It gives the sentence its most telling word – so telling that it shouldn’t be the emphatic last word for that kind of emphasis as it would misrepresent the vision of his hopeful immigrant. The final, emphatic item in the sentence represents the completely satisfied, sensible dreamer.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON: The Plain English Sentence

When I was in college, I learned about a new English language that a couple of Britishers were introducing, a universal language that was superior in all respects to Esperanto. They claimed that it was easy to learn for a non-English speaker because its vocabulary could be printed legibly on one page, 850 words, and its grammar was simple. It excited me because, like all English speakers, I already knew it. I didn’t have to learn anything new. Compulsory French I found very hard. So I studied up on Basic English and wrote an essay about it for the essay contest. I tied for first prize and won $25.

I never tried to speak using only the Basic English vocabulary. It was easy enough to read something written in Basic, but writing it was something else. I had my doubts about its principles. When Ogden, the inventor of Basic, listed exactly four hundred names of things and ideas, that is nouns, and 150 adjectives, I couldn’t believe in those very even numbers. Why not 428 nouns and 137 adjectives? I didn’t bring that up in my prize-winning essay. I agreed with the general principle that common words could express ideas that were usually expressed in less common words. Like saying “governing by force” instead of “coercion” or “twist of wire” instead of “coil.” These are from Ogden’s dictionary. Notice that Basic takes more words for the same meaning. Sort of the same.

I brought this up because our sentence from Zora Neale Hurston is in Basic English, and it’s a very good sentence. I call it plain English:

There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.

The motives for human behavior are so ambivalent, so mysterious, that a writer trying to put into one sentence an explanation for even a simple act can easily tangle himself up in illogic and cryptic circumlocutions (in Basic: “makes no sense” and “going round and round with strange words”). In everyday language, plain English doesn’t seem clear enough. Our sentence, from Hurston’s autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) is splendid plain English (also Basic) and it expresses a thought that is subtle and challenging.

Consider the kind of fussy tangles Hurston avoided:

“There is nothing” instead of “There is hardly any human activity”

“To make you like” instead of “To enable one to have affection for”

“Other human beings” instead of “Prospective acquaintances”

“So much as” instead of “To a similar extent as”

“Doing things for them” instead of “Performing acts of kindness toward them”

The sentence she might have written would sound like a stuffy character in a movie: “There is hardly any human activity to enable one to have affection for other human beings to a similar extent as performing acts of kindness for them.”

Thurston was a highly educated scholar and novelist, part of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and collector of Black folklore. She died in obscurity but is being recognized now as a classic American writer with two volumes in the Library of American Literature.

DAVID OWEN: The New Yorker Sentence

You mean they have their own special way of writing sentences? Not exactly, they just write good sentences. They have such a great editorial checking crew that they just never let a bad sentence get printed in the magazine. And they have had great writers, like the writers of some of the sentences we have in this book, like John Hersey and John McPhee and E. B. White. I had a sudden revelation recently when a sentence hit my eye and I thought, My God, that’s a New Yorker sentence! It was in an article about golf by David Owen. I Googled David Owen and found he’s been a staff writer for The New Yorker for a long time and must know how the magazine wants it.

I’ve been reading the magazine since I was in college about seventy years ago and I own the entire DVD collection of the contents, so I’m pretty familiar with The New Yorker. I know what a sentence I’ve called a New Yorker sentence is. It’s just a very good sentence. It’s part of a New Yorker article. What’s distinctive about the magazine is the article, not the sentence. But a New Yorker sentence gets its distinction because it is the essence of the article. It reflects The New Yorker readers’ values. Like me, that reader is well-educated. His tastes are sophisticated. He may not be able to buy the luxurious merchandise the magazine advertises, but his taste matches it. There are thousands of us in every large city and we feel a little smug about our taste. We get the jokes of the cartoons and the meanings of the stories and the satisfying ah-hah of the articles. Let me show you The New Yorker sentence I’m going to analyze:

Groomed fairways are the descendants of the well-grazed valley of the old linksland dunes; bunkers began as sandy depressions worn through thin turf by livestock huddling against coastal gales; the first greens and teeing grounds were flattish, elevated areas whose relatively short grass – shortly grazed by rabbits and other animals and stunted by the brutal weather – made them the logical places to begin and end holes.

We New Yorker readers don’t mind long sentences; they’re so juicy. Or the newly coined word like “linksland.” The article in the issue of April 20, 2009 is titled “The Ghost Course,” which is on the Scottish isle of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. It’s an ancient golf course, as our sentence indicates. The golf course is named Askernish and is over a century old, designed by Old Tom Morris, the “founding father” of modern golf and an Open champion who (Google tells me) beat his leading opponent by thirteen strokes, a record that lasted until Tiger Woods beat it by two strokes. Old Tom died just over a hundred years ago.

This ancient history of golf, the beloved game of New Yorker readers, is the kind of history we like, the social history of people like us. Outdoorsy, knows good wine, smart at stud poker. Others may know the big names of golfers – the Sarazens, the Hogans, the Nelsons – but now we know Old Tom Morris. Our sports knowledge is profound. Let the ordinary fans talk about the Packers and the Jets. We New Yorker readers can reminisce about Bernie Bierman and the Golden Gophers, National Champions of 1934 with Pug Lund and Butch Larson, All-Americans. (Pug Lund and Sheldon Beise talked at our assembly in Stillwater High School.) We like the way the sentence brings agriculture into the picture and the rabbits that crop greens finer than cattle. The sentence is great social history in the broad sense of suggesting the evolution of agriculture into sylvan/residential developments with streets named Clover Trail and Paper Birch Lane and the evolution of tractor into BMWs, farmers into golfers.

I’ve had my fun with New Yorker readers. Let me speak as an English professor analyzing sentences. Our sentence is truly a great sentence because it organizes a great deal of information and suggestion and ends as it should, at the end of a hole. I am a great admirer of The New Yorker, its cartoons, stories, and articles, and its style concentrated in its good sentences. As to the advertising, I do my shopping with Google where I can find anything my credit card can afford.

LYNDON JOHNSON: The Glass Metaphor Sentence

How did he get in here? Poor Lyndon Johnson, whose most successful days as a politician were the years he spent as a leader of the Senate and his worst days as President and inheritor of Kennedy’s war in Vietnam. Our sentence comes from his book My Hope for America (1964) but I found it in Norman Mailer’s review of the book, which he calls “the worst book ever written by a political leader anywhere.” Mailer had no respect for Johnson, but he voted for him in 1964 because of our sentence, the “one good sentence” in the book.

The wall between rich and poor is a wall of glass through which all can see.

This sentence expresses the genuine greatness of Lyndon Johnson, who was brought up in racist Texas and became a Texas millionaire, but whose devotion to the cause of equality in American life and law is the reason I voted for him in 1964. Mailer writes a corollary of Johnson’s sentence, which he says is “almost as good.” I quote Mailer’s sentence here: “The space between hypocrisy and honest manner may not forever insulate the powerful from the poor.” Mailer surely gets no vote for his labored and obscure sentence. It doesn’t project a dramatic image nor does it make a firm, plain statement. But it helps demonstrate the power of Johnson’s sentence.

The vehicle of the metaphor is “glass,” which has three properties: Glass is invisible and glass is transparent and glass is breakable. When feminists used the term “glass ceiling” in the 1980s, they were referring to its invisibility, a barrier above women that prevented them from promotion to higher positions in a company. The company said there was no barrier, but the women said you just don’t want to see it; you think it’s invisible, but we see it, it’s real. Women also saw glass as transparent. The glass ceiling plainly revealed the upper echelons looking down at them. They envied the superior elevation of male employees. It was Senator Hillary Clinton who, in endorsing Barack Obama as President, declared that the glass ceiling had been broken into eighteen million pieces, that is votes in the general election.

In Johnson’s sentence, glass is transparent, not invisible. The wall is solid and unbreakable, both a boundary and a barrier, but it is at the same time transparent. In James Baldwin’s sentence, there is by implication a transparent wall through which black and white see each other and thereby both know the terrible truth of race. Johnson’s sentence says the same thing: rich and poor see the terrible truth of poverty. When the history of ideas deals with race and poverty in the 1960s I hope it will put Lyndon Johnson and James Baldwin on the same page. Their sentences join them together. Mailer doesn’t make it, in my book.

GERTRUDE STEIN: The Think-About-Potatoes Sentence

Gertrude Stein loved grammar. In her book How to Write (1931), she spends many pages discussing grammar – nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, sentences, paragraphs, punctuation – and says her most interesting time in school was diagramming sentences. That makes our sentence look like a contradiction:

Forget about grammar and think about potatoes.

Let’s appreciate the catchy sentence as if it were written by someone who really does believe that grammar should be forgotten. This straightforward sentence is funny because it contrasts two things that are ridiculous to contrast. It puts together in one thought two contrasting things as if they are comparable. It’s reasonable and relevant to compare tangerines and oranges but not asparagus and oranges. The differences in a comparison or in a contrast have to be relevant to some kind of reasonable classifying logic. It’s beyond reason to compare or contrast grammar and potatoes. That weird juxtaposition is funny because the two nouns are worlds apart.

Now let’s forget about grammar and write something, as I am doing now. If I think about the grammar of this sentence as I’m writing it, I’ll never get to the end of it. It’s like walking. If you think about how you walk as you are walking, you’ll never get anywhere; you’ll stumble and fall down. If you are a writer with Stein’s book on your mind, forget the book and just write. Grammar and potatoes were not so far apart for Gertrude Stein. “Grammar is not grown,” she wrote. Grammar is not growing and changing. For her, grammar is a complex, underlying system, inborn as Chomsky would say, and universal. As a human being, you have it and you keep it. It can’t grow.

What are potatoes in her sentence? Obviously, it’s the topic of your writing, what you are writing about. I think Gertrude Stein was just writing practical common sense in our sentence. She’s saying don’t worry about how to write, just write. Forget grammar and think about potatoes.

FRANK CONROY: The Onomatopoeic Sentence

The exquisite beauty of our sentence from Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time (1967) can be appreciated best if you read it aloud. You’ll hear the careful matching of the action it describes with the rhythm and flow of the sentence. When I first read this book, it was his only book and, as time passed, eighteen years, people who had been stunned by this great autobiographical novel written by a young man wondered if he had some tragic writer’s block. I don’t know why he didn’t write, but when he started again, he published many books before he died at age sixty-nine. He was a teacher as well, director of the prestigious Iowa Writers program.

He was also a jazz musician, which may account for his musical sentence. It won’t be possible for me to analyze every phrase and syllable of the sentence to show the patterns of sounds I hear. You have to read it aloud. It would also help if you have ever achieved a little skill with a yo‑yo.

It felt good. The comfortable weight in one’s hand, the smooth, rapid descent down the string, ending with a barely audible snap as the yo‑yo hung balanced, spinning, pregnant with force and the slave of one’s fingertip.

The sentence is without a subject. The subject would be “it” in the previous sentence, and all of the phrases in our sentence would refer grammatically to that subject. “Felt good” would follow this string, and the two sentences could be punctuated as one. But the effect would be damaged. Our sentence is better if separated from “It felt good.” That short sentence would not fit the action of the yo-yo, even with only a colon joining it to our sentence.

The other effect that you will feel in the sentence is the placement of the word “spinning.” If you have played a yo-yo in such a way that it “sleeps,” you will feel it in the word “spinning.” As Conroy explains, in a proper yo-yo the string is not fastened to the axle that joins the two main parts. The string ends in a loop that goes round the axle loosely. When the yo-yo reaches the loop, it can be made either to wind up or to “sleep,” that is, to spin around inside the loop. I remember spending hours to perfect this trick. The spinning can be felt in the fingers and the time this sensation can be maintained is one of the joys of the yo-yo. “As the yo-yo hung balanced [comma, pause] spinning [comma, pause] . . .”

If you read the entire sentence aloud with some internalized realization of what the yo-yo is doing, you may appreciate what the sentence does. It isn’t often that a whole sentence can display onomatopoeia, words sounding like the action, but this is one, and Conroy took advantage of it.

GRACE PALEY: The Nourishing Sentence

Grace Paley’s writing is truly nourishing. Not only our one sentence but all her writing and all her active life are generously life-giving and nourishing in the sense of fulfilling and sustaining. Socially she took on the world and worked publicly on peace and the well being of people. In our sentence from the story “The Used-Boy Raisers,” in the collection The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Faith is the narrator and mother of two boys.

I did the dishes and organized the greedy day; dinosaurs in the morning, park in the afternoon, peanut-butter in between, and at the end of it all, to reward us for a week of beans endured, a noble rib roast with little onions, dumplings, and pink applesauce.

Faith has been married twice; her first husband fathered the boys. The men are friendly with each other and in the story have been visiting Faith and the boys. They are used-boy raisers as some men are used-car drivers: They don’t need meticulous care; they’ll be good enough for everyday use. They do not abuse the boys, but they certainly use them as if they owned them. The real father has abandoned them to their mother while still claiming certain rights, like insisting on their being educated properly. When the adoptive father reveals that he favors a good Catholic education for them in spite of his being an atheist, the real father explodes and proclaims his enmity against the church, from which he had lapsed as a youth. Faith has lost touch completely with her Jewish faith but resents the loss of the traditions of the Diaspora now that modern Israel has been established. The three represent various manifestations of alienation.

But as our sentence makes clear, the boys do not suffer alienation. They have their mother on a daily and hourly schedule. Faith holds everybody’s world together, is the center of all their stories on many levels. As she says, she organizes the greedy day, that is life. With their dinosaur playthings, she inhabits the world of the boys’ imaginations, with hours in the park, their physical and social worlds, with peanut butter, their very bodies. With the rib roast, a celebration of life, she creates for them a beautiful symbol of the spirit.

Faith’s name is perfect for her. It could just as easily be Grace. She extends her spirit to all her men and boys. She sustains the two men even as they leave her home to pursue their own affairs. “Goodbye, I said, have a nice day,” and they “set off in pride on paths which are not my own.”

FLANNERY O’CONNOR: The Classes Sentence

Flannery O’Connor’s stories express her deep religious convictions and are informed by her penetrating humor and her heritage of folk life in Georgia. Our sentence comes from her story “Revelation” in the book Everything that Rises Must Converge (1965) which, like her other books, reveals both religious and social truths with good humor. Our sentence describes the thoughts of Mrs. Turpin:

Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.

These thoughts occupy her mind every day and many nights – even in her dreams – before she gets the revelation. Her mind can’t surround the confusion of social hierarchies, people with lots of money, people of “good blood” who have lost their money, colored people who owned Lincolns and farms with white-face cattle.

We see Mrs. Turpin, an imposing farm woman who weighs one hundred and eighty pounds, as she sits in the doctor’s waiting room, observing the other patients, classifying them socially. Their shoes are their badges. At the top is the “stylish lady” whom Mrs. Turpin considers her equal. She wears shoes that match her dress. Mrs. Turpin wears black patent leather pumps. Below them are the woman in a feed-sack print, a “white trashy” woman whose “lips were stained with snuff” and “worse than niggers any day,” a woman who was not white trashy but common, an old woman wearing tennis shoes. Mrs. Turpin classifies everyone and they are either at her own level or lower. Once she has classified a person nothing else need be said. But Mrs. Turpin is unable to classify a woman who is there with her daughter. Mrs. Turpin isn’t interested in her social status because she can’t ignore the girl’s ugliness nor escape the look of hatred the girl focuses on her with her “peculiar” eyes. The girl is named Mary Grace. She is fat, nineteen years old, and attends Wellesley College. She has the ugliest face Mrs. Turpin has ever seen, purple with acne and a horrible expression aimed with her “peculiar eyes” at Mrs. Turpin.

Suddenly comes the incident that precipitates the revelation. The ugly girl throws her book at Mrs. Turpin and, howling, lunges at her and digs her fingers into Mrs. Turpin’s neck. With the aid of the doctor and nurse, Mrs. Turpin is quieted and the girl is resting on the floor. Mrs. Turpin looks into the girl’s “fierce, brilliant eyes,” and, feeling that the girl “knew her in some intense and personal way beyond time and place and condition, she asks, “What you got to say to me?” The girl whispers, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”

Mrs. Turpin is devastated. When she gets home, she goes out to the pig parlor to confront the hogs. “How am I a hog?” She seems to be addressing both her maker and the ugly girl as she says, “You could have made me trash. Or a nigger.” In a final surge of fury she shouts, “Who do you think you are?” The very atmosphere is shocked and Mrs. Turpin is stilled. Then she sees a vision in the sky, a direct contrast to the dream in our sentence: “A vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven . . . white trash . . . bands of black niggers . . . freaks and lunatics.” And at the “end of the procession” is her class, dignified and orderly, but their virtues “being burned away.”

In our sentence, all the classes, hers included, are jammed together and packed off to hell in the chaos of her mind. In her final vision, the revelation, the classes are separate but equal, mounting to heaven. The last are first, the first last. Mrs. Turpin, the social and spiritual snob, finds humility among lunatics and hogs.

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS

The best way for me to end this manual is to give you the history of my thinking and study of good sentences. My mind began to explore this subject when I was a senior in college. Professor Thomas Beyer, my instructor, knowing the bent of my mind, had suggested that I write an Honors Paper on the literary criticism of I. A. Richards. I wrote the paper, struggling to understand Richard’s ideas, which were the most challenging, mind-opening probes of my college education. I had joined without realizing it the followers of The New Criticism. Richards was the British leader of this literary movement and John Crowe Ransom was the American critic who gave the movement its name.

Wikipedia has an excellent description of The New Criticism: “Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography. . . . [They] believe the structure and meaning of the text should not be considered separately.”

The New Critics were concerned mostly with poetry. I am a New Critic in my analysis of sentences: I treat sentences as if they are lines of poetry, and I do not consider structure and meaning separately. My analyses of sentences are always a search for meaning in the structure of the sentence. I discuss the meaning I discern in how the sentence is written, in its structure. The New Critics probe ambiguity and irony in everything they read. So do I, and I include punctuation, rhythm, and every rhetorical and linguistic device writers choose when they construct a sentence. New Critics may not be linguists. Neither am I, but I understand basic linguistic principles and wrote part of a linguistics textbook. It was my study of Richards that heightened my interest in meaning. Richards and C. K. Ogden wrote The Meaning of Meaning and books about Basic English; I wrote an essay on Basic English that won a prize in a student essay contest for undergraduates. Richards’s slogan “The word is not the thing” was my slogan when I taught my first class using the book Language in Action by Hayakawa. These are the influences that shaped this manual: close reading of text and the communication of meaning through language. I continued studying The New Criticism and took classes with two leading New Critics: Eliseo Vivas at the University of Wisconsin and Robert Penn Warren at the University of Minnesota. My personal recollections of these eminent professors please me. I was a buck private stationed at Truax Field in Madison and I took advantage of the university’s offer to admit servicemen free to any class. I chose a graduate class in aesthetics and when the students saw a private from Truax in their class, they gave me some strange looks. “You’re in the wrong place, soldier.” The professor was making a point that prompted me to raise my hand. “But, professor, you wrote just the opposite of what you just said in The Journal of Philosophy.” Vivas and the class were astonished. “Thank you, sir,” Vivas said kindly. “But I was writing in reference to such and such.” I thought I had him nailed because it was a point I had made in my Honors Paper, using his article as a reference and I could almost have quoted him word for word. At the end of the class he came to my seat and held out his hand. “I’m sorry that I’ll have to cancel this class. I have to do some lectures in Colombia. I’m glad you came tonight and I’ll miss you.” I never saw him again, but I read everything I could find by and about him.

Warren was a very friendly professor who recognized you and said hello when you met him walking on the campus. I was in his creative writing class. I wrote a short novel and got an A, and my friend Bill Dyer wrote poetry. His poems were flashy and fun to read. One day I met Bill as he came out of Warren’s office. I asked how Warren liked his poems. “He said they lack depth of feeling. He thinks I should get religion and, my God, I have to get religion by next Tuesday.”

One other influence came into the picture when I entered graduate school and enrolled in the highly regarded American Studies program at the University of Minnesota. My course work was far from New Criticism: American history, American literature, American music, American art, American philosophy, sociology, political science. Now you may understand why this manual includes Henry George, Woody Guthrie, James Baldwin, and Lyndon Johnson. My dissertation was about class and status in the early American novel; the study is largely statistical and would not have been accepted by a New Critic. As you have read in my analyses, I do not hesitate to go beyond the text to make my point. The strict New Critic would be almost empty-handed to face Randolph Bourne’s “War is the health of the state” without reference to life beyond the text.

I should mention one final influence on my thinking. Before I enrolled in the American Studies program, I took a course from the famous behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner, the man who invented the “baby box.” The course was called “Psychology of Literature.” I met with him in his office once a week and he set me to work studying assonance in Wordsworth’s “The Prelude.” Skinner had a technique he had used with other students. I was to make a strip out of graph paper, a strip of small squares about twenty feet long. I would record every vowel in part of the poem and then run the strip through a window ten spaces long and count the repetitions in the ten syllables. Pure drudgery, it had nothing to do with the meaning of the poem. He gave me an A and mentioned my paper in a footnote to his book titled Verbal Behavior years later. Chomsky tore that book apart in his classic review of it. The word “empty” occurred in every paragraph. Luckily my name was not in his footnote. I learned not to be influenced by a big name.

New Criticism taught me the value of close reading and also the important truth about language: The human mind senses much of its world through words, which are innately ambiguous. We feel the magic of language, the “sensing of strangeness” when we find that a word points to more than one meaning – that ambiguity, as Lewis Thomas wrote, is a creative force. Thomas’s insights inspired me to focus on sentences and write this manual.

Index of Authors’ Sentences

PHILIP ROTH: The Sexual Sentence                                                            124

MARK TWAIN: First-Person Sentence                                                        126

RICHARD HENRY DANA: The Descriptive Sentence                            127

CHARLES E. WELLER: The Melodic Sentence                                        131

EMILY DICKINSON: The Iambic Sentence                                               133

DOROTHY NORMAN: The Idiomatic Sentence                                       135

LEWIS MUMFORD: The Colonic Sentence                                               139

HENRY GEORGE: The Metaphoric Sentence                                            145

HENRY MILLER: The Contextual Sentence                                              147

JAMES BALDWIN: The Logical Sentence                                                 148

JOHN HERSEY: The Atomic Sentence                                                        149

E. L. DOCTOROW: The Two Narrators Sentence                                     150

THORSTEIN VEBLEN: The Gobbledygook Sentence                             152

JAMES AGEE: The Paralytic Sentence                                                        153

STEPHEN JAY GOULD: The Periodic Sentence                                       155

WILLIAM GIBSON: The Triple Ambiguity Sentence                              156

WILLIAM ALEXANDER PERCY: The Flooded Sentence                     158

LOUIS SULLIVAN: The Apostrophic Sentence                                        159

EUDORA WELTY: The Words Upon Words Sentence                            161

AMIRI BARAKA: The Comma Fault Sentence                                          162

W. H. AUDEN: The Conjunction Sentence                                                 163

RANDOLPH BOURNE: The Sardonic Sentence: War                             164

EZRA POUND: The Ironic Sentence: Poetry                                              164

MARGUERITE YOUNG: The Dragnet Sentence                                      165

LEWIS THOMAS: The Creative Ambiguity Sentence                              167

GORE VIDAL: The Bag of Tricks Sentence                                               168

E. B. WHITE: The How to Write a Good Sentence                                    169

TONY HILLERMAN: The Essence Sentence                                             171

JOHN MCPHEE: The Every Word Counts Sentence                                 172

PAUL GRUCHOW: The (In)Transitive Verb Sentence                            173

WRIGHT MORRIS: The Past Perfect Sentence                                          174

SELDEN RODMAN: The Quotation Sentence                                           176

WOODY GUTHRIE: The Rhetorical Question Sentence                         177

RALPH WALDO EMERSON: The Quoted Sentence                               178

NORMAN MACLEAN: A Beginning Sentence                                         180

WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON: A Moving Sentence                          181

THOMAS P. BEYER: The Extended Metaphor Sentence                        182

WILLIAM FAULKNER: The Adjective Sentence                                     184

MARY MCCARTHY: The Transitional Sentence                                      185

WILLIAM BRANN: The Iconoclast Sentence                                            186

JONATHAN RABAN: The Immigrant Sentence                                        188

ZORA NEALE HURSTON: The Plain English Sentence                         189

DAVID OWEN: The New Yorker Sentence                                                 190

LYNDON JOHNSON: The Glass Metaphor Sentence                              192

GERTRUDE STEIN: The Think-About-Potatoes Sentence                      193

FRANK CONROY: The Onomatopoeic Sentence                                      194

GRACE PALEY: The Nourishing Sentence                                                195

FLANNERY O’CONNOR: The Classes Sentence                       196

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Arnold G. Nelson is Professor Emeritus of English at Western Michigan University. His specialties include American Studies, Linguistics, and Composition.