SENTENCE STYLES forgets the dull routine of army by a romantic adventure with the heroine: Maybe she would pretend that was her boy that was killed and we would go in the front door [of a small hotel] and the porter would take off his cap and would stop at the concierge's desk and ask for the key and she would stand by the elevator and then we would get in the elevator and it would go up very slowly clicking at all the floors and then our floor and the boy would open the door and stand there and she would step out and would step out and we would walk down the hall and would put the key in the door and open it and go in and then take down the telephone and ask them to send a bottle of capri bianca in a silver bucket full of ice and you would hear the ice against the pail coming down the corridor and the boy would knock and would say leave it outside the door please. Both and Hemingway use the sen- tence to describe an experience taking place within the mind. The style suggests the continuous flow of dreaming, for we fantasize in a stream of loosely connected feelings and ideas and images, not in neatly packaged sentences of intricately related clauses and phrases tied together by if, but, yet, therefore, consequently, on the other hand. Indeed, we some- times fantasize not in words at all but in imagined percep- tions, as Hemingway implies ("and you would hear the ice against the pail"). Hemingway also goes further than Gra- hame in imitating the mental state of fantasy: his one sentence is much longer and its flow unimpeded by punctuation. This technique is a variety of what is called "stream of conscious- ness," a way of writing that suggests a mind feeling, dreaming, thinking in a loose associational manner. Multiple Coordination and Parataxis The Grahame, Hemingway, and biblical examples all use mul- tiple coordination, linking clauses by coordinating conjunc- these cases, as in most, by using the word For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org THE SENTENCE Instead of being coordinated, however, independent clauses can be butted together without conjunctions, in which case they are conventionally punctuated by semicolons, though sometimes commas are clear enough. This is called parataxis. Although either multiple coordination or parataxis is pos- sible in a freight-train sentence, they are not exact equivalents. Broadly speaking, the is called for when the ideas or feelings or perceptions are when the writer desires a quick and fluid movement from clause to clause. These conditions are true of the three examples we have just seen, as they are of the following relatively short sentence by Hemingway: It was a hot day and the sky was bright and the road was white and dusty. There is movement here, involving both the scene and the sense by which we perceive it: we feel the heat, see the sky, lower our eyes to gaze down the road. The sentence style directs our senses much as a camera directs them in a guiding us from one perception to another, yet creating a con- tinuous experience. The freight-train style, then, can analyze experience much like a series of segregating sentences. But it brings the parts more closely together, and when it uses mul- tiple coordination, it achieves a high degree of fluidity. On the other hand, fluidity is not always desirable. Ideas or perceptions may be repetitive, with little change and noth- ing to flow together. Then parataxis is preferable to multiple coordination. In the following example Virginia sum- marizing a diary of an eighteenth-century Englishman visiting France, uses a freight-train style to mock his insularity: This is what he writes about, and, of course, about the habits of the natives. The habits of the natives are disgusting; the women hawk on the floor, the forks are dirty; the trees are poor; the Pont Neuf is not a patch on London Bridge; the cows are skinny; morals are licentious; polish is good; cabbages cost so much; bread is made of coarse flour. For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org SENTENCE STYLES Each detail is another instance of the same underlying insen- sitivity. By hooking her clauses with semicolons (in one case with a comma) Woolf stresses the dull, unyielding vision of the diarist. Along with its advantages, the freight-train sentence has limitations. Like the segregating style, it does not handle ideas very subtly. The freight-train sentence implies that the thoughts it links together with grammatical equality are equally significant. But usually ideas are not of the same order of importance; some are major, others secondary. Moreover, this type of construction cannot show very precise logical relationships of cause and effect, condition, concession, and so on. It joins ideas only with such general conjunctions as and, but, or, nor or even less exactly with semicolons and commas. The Triadic Sentence A second deficiency of the freight-train sentence is that it lacks a clear shape. Being open-ended, it has no necessary stopping place; one could go on and on adding clauses. As a way of providing it with a clearer structural principle, the freight-train sentence is sometimes composed in three units and is called a triad:2 Her showmanship was superb; her timing sensational; her dramatic instinct uncanny. Business executives, economists, and the public alike knew little of the industrial system they were operating; they were unable to di- agnose the malady; they were unaware of the great forces operating beneath the Arnold Often, as in these examples, the three clauses are paratactic rather than coordinated because the triadic sentence tends to 2. These sentences are also called tricolons. Loosely, colon designated in an- cient Greek rhetoric an independent clause that was part of a longer sentence. A is a sentence of three such clauses. For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org THE SENTENCE be repetitive. But it can use conjunctions when shifts in sub- ject occur: Then the first star came out and the great day was over and in the vestibule saw my grandmother saluted by her sons who wished her a happy holiday. In sentence the final clause is substantially longer than the two that precede it. Movement to a longer, more complicated construction is a refinement of the triadic sentence: The canisters were almost out of reach; made a motion to aid her; she turned upon me as a miser might turn if anyone attempted to assist him in counting his money. Emily Bronte Occasionally the shift may work in the opposite direction, from long to short: Calvin Coolidge believed that the least government was the best government; he aspired to become the least President the country ever had; he attained his desire. Irving stone The Cumulative Sentence Most commonly a cumulative sentence consists of an initial independent clause followed by a number of subordinate con- structions which accumulate details about the person, place, event, or idea. Though the elements that come after the main clause are technically subordinate, they carry the main load of the sentence and are fully as important. Cumulative sentences appear most often in description. The writer begins with a general picture, like an artist's char- coal sketch, then fills in the details: A creek ran through the meadow, winding and turning, clear water running between steep banks of black earth, with shallow places where you build a dam. For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org SENTENCE STYLES 7000 Romaine St. looks itself like a faded movie exterior, a pastel building with chipped arte moderne detailing, the windows now either boarded up or paned with chicken-wire glass and, at the entrance, among the dusty oleander, a rubber mat that reads WELCOME. Joan Didion Cumulative sentences are also useful in character sketches: She [Anne Morrow Lindbergh] was then twenty-one, a year out of Smith College, a dark, shy, quiet girl with a fine mind and a small but pure and valuable gift for putting her thoughts and fancies, about the earth, sky, and sea, on paper. John Lardner Though less often used in narration, the cumulative sen- tence can also handle a series of events, as in this account of an English military expedition into France in 1359: The unwieldy provision carts, draught horses, and heavily armed knights kept the advance down to nine miles a day, the huge horde moving in three parallel columns, cutting broad highways of litter and devastation through an already abandoned countryside, many of the adventurers now traveling on foot, having sold their horses for bread or having slaughtered them for meat. John Gardner Like the freight-train style, the cumulative has the problem of being open-ended, without a natural stopping place. But the deficiency may be made good by artful construction. In the following example the writer, a photograph of his parents, opens with the clause "When they sat for a pho- tograph together," follows this with accumulated details, and ends by assessing the meaning of the picture: When they sat for a photograph neat slim bodies, the girl unsmiling and her eyes astare, elbows and knees tight, hands clenched in her lap, immaculate to the throat in lacy white, and the young man with grin and straw hat both aslant, jaunty on the bench arm, one leg crossed, natty in his suit and tie com- plete with stickpin, his arm around her with fingers outspread For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org THE SENTENCE possessively upon her was a portrait not only of con- trasts, but of a nation's lower middle class coming out of its COCOOn. William Gibson What happens in that sentence is that the accumulation is gathered between dashes and intrudes into the middle of the main sentence ("When they sat for a photograph together . it was a portrait not only of contrasts, but of a nation's lower middle class coming out of its cocoon"). That sentence be- comes a frame enclosing the details, a pattern nicely suited to what the sentence is about. Finally, there is another variety of the cumulative sentence, in which the order is reversed: the accumulated details precede the main clause instead of following it. In the following ex- ample a novelist, discussing her art, begins by listing the es- sentials of a story. Conflicts and rivalries and their resolutions, pride and its fate, es- trangement and reconciliation, revenge or forgiveness, quests and searches rewarded or unrewarded; abidingness versus change, love and its are among the constants, the themes of the Story. Elizabeth Notice how Bowen uses these to sum up all the preceding nouns and to act as the subject of the sentence. (These, this, that, those, and such are other pronouns which may be used in this way.) For Practice Describe one of your typical days, first in five or six segregating sentences, then in two freight-train sentences, and finally in one long cumulative sentence. Keep to the same details and order in each rendering. The Parallel Style Parallelism means that two or more words or constructions stand in an identical grammatical relationship to the same For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org SENTENCE STYLES thing. Jack and Jill went up the hill the Jack and are parallel because both relate to the verb went. In the following sentence, the italicized clauses are parallel, both modifying the verb will come: We come when we are ready and when we choose. Parallelism occurs in all types of sentences as a way of or- ganizing minor constructions. When major ideas are involved, we speak of a parallel style, as in this sentence, where three parallel objects follow the preposition "in": its energy, its lyrics, its advocacy of frustrated joys, rock is one long symphony of protest. magazine And here, three infinitive phrases modifying the word "campaign": The Department of Justice began a vigorous campaign to break up the corporate empires, to restore the free and open market, and to plant the feet of the industry firmly on the road to competition. Thurman Arnold Parallel constructions are subject to a strict rule of style: they must be in the same grammatical form. Consider this opening of a sentence by the eighteenth-century political writer Edmund Burke: To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present pos- sessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind. . According to the rule the four subjects of the verb are must be in the same grammatical form, and Burke has made them all infinitives. They could have been gerunds {complaining, murmuring, lamenting, conceiving) or nouns {complaints, For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org THE SENTENCE murmurs, conceptions). But in any case the point is that they must all be the same. To combine different forms would violate the example, mixing an infinitive with a gerund (To complain of the age we live in, murmuring against the present possessors of power). Such awkward mixtures are called shifted constructions and are regarded as a serious breach of style, sloppy and often ambiguous. Extended parallelism is not a hallmark of modern writing, as it was in the eighteenth century, when the parallel style was predominant in formal prose. On the other hand it is foolish and unseeing to dismiss parallel sentences as out-of-date. They are still useful and by no means uncommon: We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on out there. Annie Dillard The professor shuffled into the room, dumped his notes onto the desk, and began his usual dull lecture. College student Advantages of Parallelism Parallel sentences have several advantages. First, they are im- pressive and pleasing to hear, elaborate yet rhythmic and or- dered, following a master plan with a place for everything and everything in its place. Second, parallelism is economical, using one element of a sentence to serve three or four others. Piling up several verbs after a single subject is probably the most common parallel pattern, as in the two examples just above. Paralleling verbs is particularly effective when describing a process or event. The sequence of the verbs analyzes the event and establishes its progress, and the concentration on verbs, without the re- current intervention of the subject, focuses the sentence on action. Here is an example, a description of prairie dogs, writ- ten by the American historian Francis Parkman: As the danger drew near they would wheel about, toss their heads in the air, and dive in a twinkling into their burrows. For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org SENTENCE STYLES And another, an account of an invasion of Italy in 1494 by Charles VIII of France: Charles borrowed his way through Savoy, disappeared into the Alps, and emerged, early in September, at Asti, where his ally met him and escorted him to the suburbs. Ralph Roeder A third advantage of parallelism is its capacity to enrich meaning by emphasizing or revealing subtle connections be- tween words. For instance, in the example by Roeder the par- allelism hints at the harebrained nature of Charles's expedi- tion. Similarly Bernard Shaw, writing about Joan of Arc, insinuates a sardonic view of humanity below the surface of this prosaic summary of Joan's life: Joan of Arc, a village girl from the was born about burnt for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery in rehabilitated after a fashion in 1456; designated venerable in declared Blessed in 1908; and finally canonized in 1920. Of course, Shaw's irony is carried essentially by the words themselves, but the rapid parallel progression of the verbs enables us to see more easily the wicked of which human beings are capable, destroying a woman whom later they would deem saintly. The meaning reinforced by a parallel style does not have be ironic. It can have any emotional or intellectual coloring. In the first of the following examples we can hear a sly amuse- ment; in the second, anger; and in the third, eloquence: She laid two fingers on my shoulder, cast another look into my face under her candle, turned the key in the lock, gently thrust me be- yond the door, shut it; and left me to my own devices. Walter de la Mare He [George III] has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. Thomas Jefferson For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org SENTENCE Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty. John F. Kennedy Limitations of Parallelism The parallel style handles ideas better than do the segregating or freight-train sentences. However, it suits only ideas that are logically parallel: several effects of the same cause, for in- stance, or three or four conditions of a single effect. When writers try to force parallelism onto ideas that are not logically parallel, they obscure rather than clarify meaning. A second disadvantage of the parallel style is that it seems a bit formal for modern taste. And a third is that parallelism can be wordy rather than economical if allow the style to dominate them, padding out ideas to make a parallel sen- tence, instead of making a parallel sentence to organize ideas. Yet despite these limitations parallelism remains an impor- tant resource of sentence style, one which many people ne- glect. It is a most effective way of ordering perceptions or ideas or feelings, of shaping a sentence, and of attaining econ- omy and emphasis. For Practice Following the pattern of the sentence by Edmund Burke (page construct parallel sentences on these topics (or any others that you may prefer): Duties of a policeman or other official Complaints about a job Mistakes you make in writing The Balanced Sentence A balanced sentence consists of two parts roughly equivalent in both length and significance and divided by a pause: For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org [...]... split into three ( / ) or ( / ) Both halves may be broken into two ( / ), and so on Here are a few examples: For being logical they strictly separate poetry from prose; and as in prose they are strictly prosaic, so in poetry, they are purely poetical ( / ) G K Chesterton But called by whatever name, it is a most fruitful region; kind to the native, interesting to the visitor ( / ) Thomas Carlyle I stood... "between," though the second is too much longer than the first to constitute a balance However, balance does occur in the two "who" clauses, though these are not parallel because they modify different nouns The Advantages of Balance Balanced construction has several virtues It is pleasing to our eyes and ears, and gives shape to the sentence, one of the essentials of good writing It is memorable And by... sentences The very style seems to confirm the fairness and lack of dogmatism suggested by such phrases as "seem to me" and "I think": In fine, there are things about Chesterfield that seem to me rather repellant; things that it is an offense in critics to defend He is typical of one side of the eighteenth century—of what still seems to many its most typical side But it does not seem to me the really good side... agree to call such sentences balanced, arguing that balanced constructions must be of the same grammatical order and therefore that a balanced sentence requires that its halves be independent clauses However, to the degree that we hear a sentence as consisting of two parts more or less equal in length and importance, it is balanced The balance is more exact when the parts are independent clauses cut to. .. me, I frankly cleave to the Greeks and not to the Indians, and I aspire to be a rational animal rather than a pure spirit George Santayana The sentence balances two coordinated clauses of similar structure and length Within the first clause, the prepositional For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org SENTENCE STYLES IJJ phrases "to the Greeks and not to the Indians" are parallel... Comic, too, is the effect of this sentence from the autobiography of Edward Gibbon, the historian of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which describes an unhappy love affair of his youth, broken off at his father's insistence: After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate: I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life Writing. .. less "natural" way of writing than the segregating style or the freight-train or cumulative sentences However, we ought not to equate formality with artificiality or to think naturalness the only ideal All wellconstructed sentences result from art, even those—perhaps especially those—like Hemingway's that create the illusion of naturalness Remember, too, that natural is a tricky word To men and women of... century, parallelism and balance reflected nature, which they understood as a vast but comprehensible structure of ordered parts Perhaps the best lesson a modern writer can learn from the parallel and balanced styles is the necessity of giving shape to what he or she thinks and feels The shape congenial to the eighteenth century seems unnatural to us But while we no ... things to pursue in life than of things to avoid Because the balanced style keeps a distance between writer and subject, it works well for irony and comedy For instance, the novelist Anthony Trollope implies humorous disapproval of a domineering female character in this way: It is not my intention to breathe a word against Mrs Proudie, but still I cannot think that with all her virtues she adds much to. .. Or, to be more exact, certain kinds of meaning Not every sentence can be cast in this mold, or should be Like every style, parallelism and balance have limitations as well as potentialities Their very sanity, reasonableness, and control make them unsuitable for conveying the immediacy of raw experience or the intensity of strong emotion Moreover, their formality is likely to seem too elaborate to modern . "campaign": The Department of Justice began a vigorous campaign to break up the corporate empires, to restore the free and open market, and to plant the feet. G. K. Chesterton But called by whatever name, it is a most fruitful region; kind to the native, interesting to the visitor. ) Thomas Carlyle stood like one