Beautiful Sentencing

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I want to write about the beauty of the sentence. In English, our basic sentence is what Ellen Voigt (2009) calls “the fundament” – a subject and a predicate. Or what we might call a noun/pronoun and a verb form. From there, things only become more interesting.

The woman walked. We know who (at least at a general level) and we know what she did. I could add an adjective—The old woman walked—and an adverb—The old woman walked slowly. But I think it best to avoid modifiers if you can choose more particular nouns and verbs. In this case, changing ‘walked slowly’ to ‘shuffled’ would revise the image immediately. The old woman shuffled. Instead of an adverb, I’ll use an adverbial phrase that tells you where she was: down the hospital hallway. I think you are getting the picture.

But now we can play with the sentence, the independent clause, by adding this dependent or subordinate clause: after her visitors went home. The clause alone does not make much sense. Hearing only that we might ask ‘after whose visitors went home’? But the clause really begins to establish a narrative when we add it to our independent clause: The old woman shuffled down the hospital hallway after her visitors went home.

The syntax of the sentence reveals relationships through its choice of clauses and helps to establish the rhythm of a voice. Readers, without being too conscious about it, can see the importance and connections among the words. A complex sentence—like the one above—shows the heart of the sentence and the underlying details that support it. In our example, the woman is the heart, but we understand her response through the dependent clause about the visitors. 

If we revise that sentence to be a compound construction, that is, two independent clauses joined, the relationship changes: The old woman shuffled down the hospital hallway and her visitors went home. The connection between these ideas now shifts. We have two independent actions—what the woman did and what her visitors did, actions that may or may not be causally related. We can speculate about the relationship between these events, but the possibilities are not as clear as with the complex sentence.

Sentences can become even more interesting if we create a larger arrangement of clauses and phrases, what is often called a hypotactic sentence (hypo meaning below, indicating that some phrases are dependent). Here is our sentence in a more ‘hypotactic’ form: The old woman shuffled down the hallway, an activity which she had performed daily for the past week, just as her visitors went home day after day, leaving her alone in a place that she no longer recognized. We begin to see some further causality among events; we can speculate who these visitors are and their relationship to the woman. We begin to predict what is happening to her.

I could play endlessly with this one sentence. For instance, I could make it paratactic—a sentence where all the phrases have equal weight; that is, they are all independent. The old woman shuffled down the hallway; she had performed this activity daily for the past week, and her visitors went home day after day; they left her alone in a place that she no longer recognized. Personally, I like the nuances available in the hypotactic structure, especially for narratives like this little one. Parataxis has its uses, though, particularly when we want our ideas to have equal weight.

It is important to recognize the distinction between simplicity in writing and the complexity of sentences. When I think of simplicity in writing, I do not mean that every sentence should be short; rather, the simplicity comes in the clarity of thinking and in the choice of language. In order to write meaningful complex sentences, you have to know the ideas you are trying to convey and recognize the relationships among them. This is why such sentences often need several rewrites so they are not ‘cluttered’ and the reader can understand your viewpoint. You also need to choose clear, direct words; that is, the best noun or verb to convey your meaning. Aim for the concrete and the evocative rather than the euphemistic and vague. A good illustration of this practice is in William Zinsser’s, On Writing Well, where he quotes from a government memo written in 1942 during the World War II. Zinsser follows this memo with President Roosevelt’s response:

Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination.

“Tell them,” Roosevelt said, “that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows.”

                                                                        (Zinsser, 1988, p. 8)

I want to end this discussion about sentences with an excerpt from the opening of The Purchase, an award-winning novel by Linda Spalding. It beautifully shows the power of explicit language, varying sentence lengths (even sentence fragments), and the power of complex and compound sentences in relation:

Daniel looked over at the daughter who sat where a wife should sit. Cold sun with a hint of snow. The new wife rode behind him like a stranger while the younger children huddled together, coughing and clenching their teeth. The wind shook them and the wagon wounded the road with its weight and the river gullied along to one side in its heartless way. It moved east and north while Daniel and all he had in the world went steadily the other way, praying for fair game and tree limbs to stack up for shelter. “We should make camp while it’s light,” said the daughter, who was thirteen years old and holding the reins. But Daniel wasn’t listening. He heard a wheel grating and the river gullying. He heard his father – the memory of that lost, admonishing voice – but he did not hear his daughter, who admonished in much the same way.

. . . Indeed sentences are powerful allies if you learn to wield their potential.