Emily Brisse | March/April 2012

NOTES

I cannot begin this essay without admitting that: I am an English teacher, and yet the one thing I loathe perhaps even more than algebra is grammar. I start reading terms like adjectival complement and predicate nominative and nominative absolute, and my brain begins to settle into a dull sludge, and instead of slowing down, deconstructing these words, figuring out what they mean and what they can teach me about writing, my mind chooses to remember sitting in the back of my own ninth-grade English classroom, looking at my sweet teacher, and suddenly and passionately knowing that I hated her. As long as she continued to put up overheads of grammar exercises and draw lines on the board that looked like tipped-over trees-yes: I felt hate. What I actually hated, of course, was what she was turning language into-subject, predicate, object-as if sentences were all logic, not the magical incantations I had until then believed them to be.

Magical incantations-now that sounds more interesting. Certainly more fun. In fact, it's what I originally had in mind for this essay: why certain stories move us, why particular passages steal our breath away, why the right sentence yanks us out of our ordinary orbits and leaves us gasping in an entirely new world. Isn't this why most of us started writing in the first place? To affect readers like this? To create such scenes? It was for me.

So I went to the book Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. It's a collection of linked stories that reads like a novel, and it's the work I hold most responsible in my pursuit of an MFA. I remember reading it four years ago and coming across passages like this:

Northern lights. Something in the cold, wet atmosphere brought them out. I grabbed Lipsha's arm. We floated into the field and sank down, crushing green wheat. We chewed the sweet grass tips and stared up and were lost. Everything seemed to be one piece. The air, our faces, all cool, moist, and dark, and the ghostly sky. Pale green licks of light pulsed and faded across it. Living lights. Their fires lobbed over, higher, higher, then died out in blackness. At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.1

With those words I felt my entire body lift. I felt language cast a spell over me and I knew I wanted that power.

Rereading Love Medicine this past winter, the same thing happened, and every time it did, I took the cap off of my highlighter and colored over paragraphs, sentences, and phrase after phrase after phrase. Eventually I turned to my husband. "Damn," I said. "I think I'm writing an essay on grammar."

Lest you start to think the same thoughts I aimed at my ninth-grade teacher, let me clarify that by grammar, I mean syntax, and by syntax, I mean the ways writers manipulate chunks of language-specifically during the revision process-to achieve certain effects. So, magical incantations after all. Rereading Erdrich has helped me realize and appreciate that after the character, after the fully fleshed-out plot, after point of view and theme and setting and everything else that makes our stories come alive, there is the sentence. There is the one well-placed word. And these small geographical details of our writing are what take our words from drafts to shining, gracefully crafted landscapes. I won't diagram any sentences here, and I'm not going to explain what a nominative absolute is, but I am going to talk syntax in regard to style-focusing first on shape and then symbol-and it's my hope that these pages leave you with a deeper appreciation for why the sentence is one of our most powerful tools.

Shape

Joseph Williams, the author of Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, talks about the "psychological geography" of a sentence.2 This term resonates with me because even though he is talking about a grammatical formula that most Western readers expect and recognize-introductory material plus subject-predicate-object plus the rest of the sentence-just that word geography is enough to help me frame this structure in images. He is saying that our readers come to our sentences expecting to find patterns, to first see the sand-noun-before they feel it-verb-hot between their toes. Ellen Bryant Voigt, the author of The Art of Syntax, a text that analyzes the uses of syntax in poetry, insists that these patterns are deeply rooted, that they form when, as babies, we listen to our parents and caregivers string together vowels and consonants that become words then phrases then systematic, predictably structured sentences.3 It's no wonder that a garbled sentence feels ungainly and confusing to a reader. Reading it would be something like a child navigating her way through a dense forest when she's only used to wide-open plains.

But, of course, our readers are not children, and it's my guess that most of them-and most of us-wouldn't mind now and again trading in a familiar landscape for something new and unexpected. It's the same way with the structure of our sentences, and that is why studying their shape can be so beneficial in the revision process.

Look again at the earlier excerpt from Love Medicine. If we take it apart in regard to the shape of Erdrich's sentences, we can see that, yes, most of them adhere to the subject-plus-predicate pattern, but it's clear that they are not all wide-open plains sentences-or dense forest or mountain range sentences, for that matter. Instead, there are varieties in the presented landscapes. The basic simple-sentence pattern exists: "I grabbed Lipsha's arm." But this line-"As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it"-complicates the familiar structure. And in "Northern lights" and "Living lights" we're given fragments. Both of these two-word sentences are the shortest in the passage, and they contrast with the longest, which is comprised of twenty-two words. What does this math and labeling amount to? The reason why we all love a good road trip: the changing scenery keeps our eyes and minds interested.

For the sake of this metaphor, consider short sentences as short roads-small stretches of pavement or gravel that lead quickly to intersections, dead ends, and destinations. This is the kind of sentence we all started with, the kind we pronounced proudly from our kindergarten readers-It is cold! I want spring! It's pretty clear what those sentences mean, and yet the short clause goes beyond simplicity. It can serve very sophisticated functions if we understand its potential.

Imagine yourself paused at an unexpected stop sign. Those moments of heightened alertness-Do I go straight? Do I turn? What is this handwriting!-are moments a writer should take advantage of, and can, by grasping the capabilities of the short sentence. According to Virginia Tufte, author of Artful Sentences, these quick clauses act as the perfect conduit for interruptions, transitions, restatements, conclusions, introductions of new speakers, and-the most common purpose of short sentences-emphasis.4 Where do you want the reader to look? To what do you want them to pay attention? By placing such information inside of a small syntactic unit, you will not only make it hard to miss, but you will also make it memorable. It will have impact.

Short sentences also add the element of texture. Imagine navigating through a battle zone. Mud flying. Smoke rising. Bombs exploding into deep earthen bruises. Tufte points out that using action verbs with little expansion can portray a frenzy of activity, of anxiety or violence.5 Conversely, think now about passing field after field of corn. There's a field. There's a road. There's a field. There's a road. Short clauses in parallel patterns of be phrases are clearly useful in recounting routine, dreariness, evacuation, and absence.6 On the first page of Love Medicine, Erdrich's shortest sentence is eight words: "She had seen so many come and go." This captures not only characterization, but also tone-each verb inevitable, each word save one a single syllable, each word intimating loneliness. A longer sentence might have a more difficult time conveying such an accurate emotional punch.

But what about those long sentences? They certainly cause some trouble, and yet eliminating them from our prose would be a mistake. Think about the most desired hotel rooms. They are not the ones with windows facing walls. We want to be able to see for miles; our eyes want room to roam. A long sentence allows the mind this sort of pleasurable scanning. The problem lies in the sprawl, the amount of things to look at, the likelihood of our pleasure-seeker focusing on, say, the gnarly waves instead of the brewing hurricane creating them, and this is why it's our responsibility as writers to construct the view intentionally.

Williams points out that the most common long-sentence problems are a result of four things. Two are dangling or misplaced modifiers and sentences strung together in ways that don't fit into the patterns we've come to expect-an object split from its verb, for example, or an unclear subject.7 In a sentence like, "Roaring with power, I found it hard to ride the waves," there exists the potential for unintended comedy. These are things that a careful writer catches in revision, and with just a little tweaking, they are easy to repair.

The trickier fixes, though, come with the intentionally extravagant sentences, the drawn-out ones, the ones made long for textual purposes. These formations can create enormous propulsion and drama, a feeling of inevitability or weight. This is an important device for a creative writer, but often writing from a place of such inspired drama can lead to the final two problems that Williams discusses: unclear connections and faulty coordination.8 Faulkner can get away with a sentence that goes on for a page or more, but most of us cannot; most readers will not stand for it, and this is because it's easy to lose track of where the sentence began. Think about the frustration you feel when you get lost. It's not only annoying to always be back-tracking, but it also takes your focus away from the interesting details along the trail.

So, how to avoid a stumbling reader while still providing her with a winding path? Williams talks about modifiers and right-branching sentences as options. The single term, though, that seems to come up again and again in his and other texts in regard to clarity in long sentences is parallelism. Williams believes that coordination is the "foundation of a gracefully shaped sentence," and based on the passages I highlighted in Love Medicine, it seems I would agree.9

One of my favorite examples of parallelism from Erdrich's book is the following description of women cooking together: "Then they were laughing out loud in brays and whoops, sopping tears in their aprons and sleeves, waving their hands helplessly."10 Who, upon reading that sentence, does not experience the rhythm that Erdrich's parallelism creates? Not only are all the verbs coordinated-laughing, sopping, waving-but their phrases are also matched-brays and whoops, aprons and sleeves, and-a small tweak in the pattern-hands helplessly, two "h's" instead of two things. Our appreciation for patterns like this makes sense, because humans have always been attracted to symmetry. We can see this across history in virtually every art form, even in the faces we find most beautiful. So, when we employ order in our prose-whether in a short or extended form-readers respond positively. A large vista of mountains may appear arduous to the explorer, but at least he knows the trail goes up then down. There is a comfort in anticipating that much, and in most instances, it will be enough to get him to his destination.

The final details I'll address in regard to shape are a passage's first and last words or images. Perhaps I'm alone in this, but I tend to remember flights just as well as I remember my experiences in new locations. I've decided that this is because on the departure flight I'm in a state of anticipation, and upon the return I'm reflective. Is it possible that we read sentences with these same states of mind, with this same rhythm? If so, then we should be intentional not only about how our chapters and paragraphs open and close, but also how we use these locations in our sentences.

In her style guide, Tufte points out that two-thirds of English sentences begin with a subject.11 This fits in with what we already know: readers like familiar patterns. And it's logical to reveal the what or who before the how and where and why. But knowing this gives us an opportunity to use this opening position in new and surprising ways. By postponing the subject, inverting the expected order of things, we can create suspense. Tufte discusses inversions at length, and the success of the very best examples, she says, "lies in the peculiar skill with which the author weaves the rest of the sentence into an elaboration of the front-shifted element."12

Here's another example from Love Medicine's opening page. Erdrich could have written, "He noticed her because of the way she moved." It's a fine sentence syntactically, but I believe Erdrich understood it to be cliched and therefore uninteresting-a sentence that could be better. So she front-shifted. Movement comes up first, and even before that, a wobbly adverb: "Probably it was the way she moved, easy as a young girl on slim hard legs, that caught the eye of the man who rapped at her from the window of the Rigger Bar."13 For me, that "probably" hangs over the entire sentence; I'm anticipating this indecision with every word. First impressions do color the way we read things, from people to places to the rest of a sentence, so it serves us to make the first word matter.

Of course, time and reflection can alter a first impression. We remember most what is nearest, and therefore the ends of sentences hold a weighty place in our language's psychological geography. Many writers say unequivocally that this location is most important. Williams points out that such a reaction is natural, that you can "sense that position when you hear your voice naturally rise and fall on the last word or two of a sentence as you stress one syllable more strongly than you do the others."14 Speech writers certainly know this; think about our nation's famous quotations. Not "A dream came to me," but "I have a dream." Not "The infamy of this day will live on," but "A day that will live in infamy." These final words are strong, visceral, something the rest of the sentence can stand on.

In regard to landscape, the final word or phrase is the end of the trail, the vista that throws the rest of the sentence into relief. And think about how those vistas can vary. In the same way a granite pit is different from a swamp, a sentence that ends with a hard noun-stone-will create a different effect than one that ends with a soft adverb-lazily. So how we manage this final stress position in our writing, the specific words we choose, goes a long way toward "establishing the voice (our) readers hear."15 Again, Erdrich could have said, "She felt fragile later on," but in leaving the adjective until the end-"It was later still that she felt so fragile"-we feel that fragility, its more delicate rhythm, and we leave the sentence jolted by it, strangely aching.16 Sometimes we write this way intuitively. When we do, this is often when we feel brilliant, tapped in to the muses. When we don't? That's when careful, word-by-word revision like this becomes such a gift.

Symbol

Shape is something we can see, something we can talk about with a degree of exactitude, for it does have parameters and a set vocabulary that we can use to describe it. But if that's where we stopped, we would be looking-and revising-too quickly. There are whole worlds that exist under forest floors or ocean surfaces, whole worlds of roots and currents and meaning. Is it possible that we can create our sentences in such a way that they have this depth too? This richness? I believe so. For me, the writing of Erdrich and other authors has proved it. My second main topic-the symbolism of an intentionally created sentence-is an attempt to mine this level of syntax and examine how it is formed so skillfully.

Glance once more at the quote of Erdrich's that I began with. In the story, her protagonist is describing the Aurora Borealis, a gorgeous display of colorful lights streaking across the night sky. She writes:

Everything seemed to be one piece. The air, our faces, all cool, moist, and dark, and the ghostly sky. Pale green licks of light pulsed and faded across it. Living lights. Their fires lobbed over, higher, higher, then died out in blackness. At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing.17

It's clear that a passage like this is well written, for it has all of the components of shape I've just discussed. But the skill here goes beyond sentence-length variety and emphatic endings. It's beautiful, almost objectively so. But why? What exactly is going on here and how can we learn from it and apply it to our own drafts?

One of the most interesting terms and definitions I've come across relating to syntax was in Tufte's Artful Sentences. She talks about syntactic symbolism-"language arranged to look or sound like action."18 Others have called this technique "rhythmic mimesis" or "absolute rhythm."19 Regardless of the term used, each underscores Tufte's belief that language is dynamic, and that, essentially, we don't just read sentences, but we also make meaning out of how clauses and phrases actually appear as we read them and how they move.20 So writing a powerful sentence can be more than just finding the right words and putting them in the right order. Tufte might suggest that it should be. She points out that "syntax is by nature more limited than meaning, for it must carry many different meanings... (in a) specific, single (grammatical) structure... But now and then a skilled writer may use the same structure in a way that mimics the particular actions the sentence describes."21

In my opinion, this explains why the Erdrich passage works so well. If you have ever seen Northern Lights, you know that they do all the things she describes-pulse and fade, shoot and pucker, and gather. She could have just said that: "The lights pulsed, faded, shot, puckered, and gathered." Factually accurate. Syntactically accurate. But wrong wrong wrong in capturing the quality of what she's depicting. It's too orderly. It's too much like traffic lights switching from yellow to red. The inherent nature of the Aurora Borealis is that it's impossible to guess when the colors will change, when the forms will shift, where the edges of light will blur and fade away. When Erdrich writes, "Their fires lobbed over, higher, higher, then died out in blackness," we don't just see this event because it is well described.22 We feel it in the spatial arc of the words: lobbed, higher, higher, died. This is symbolic syntax. This is writing that is aware of not only the shape of a sentence's landscape but how that landscape moves.

Before I discuss specific techniques, let me note that examples of syntactic symbolism seem to be employed sparingly. In the psychological geography of whole stories or novels, they would be particularly stunning scenes, the uncommon visions we promise ourselves we will never forget and then don't. The first time we are taken behind a waterfall, for example, or brought to the cold depths of a crystal cave. But what if we visited similar places every day? Certainly we would still find them beautiful, but I doubt we'd be as surprised each time, nor as moved. Just as too many metaphors or similes detract from their effectiveness, too many uses of this method lessen its drama. So as with everything in revision, use this technique with a clear and patient aim.

Also, since syntactic symbolism is about mimicking action or emotion, in order to use this device you must find a point in your draft where something is happening-externally or internally. And since writing symbolically will most likely draw added attention and emphasis to the sentence in which you use it, it makes sense to find some occurrence that bears significant weight on your story. In other words, it's one thing to murder your darlings; it's another thing to waste them.

Tufte says this kind of symbolism can be enhanced by thinking about several things as they relate to the action in our writing. The first is sound. Onomatopoeia certainly plays a role in symbolic language, for it's difficult to hear a phrase describing "the side to side swish of breeze-blown grasses" and not mentally hear it or feel the swish against your skin. Sound also has an impact on the phrase in its deliberately selected sibilants-all those "s's" and "z's": grass, swish, side, breeze. But Tufte says that phrases like these aren't just successful because of appropriate sounds; instead, she insists that at the base of these constructions is syntax-the way, as writers, we order our words and borrow from poetry's emphasis on metrics.23

We prose writers would discuss this as rhythm, the sonic shape we give our sentences. Just as there is musical rhythm in landscapes-the way palm leaves lift in the wind (legato) or the way rain pounds the surface of a lake (staccato)-we can find those sounds in our sentences, too, and how we use them can add an intuitive, symbolic level to our prose.

Take this example from Love Medicine: "She puffed her cheeks out in concentration, patting and crimping the edges of the pies."24 Puff is onomatopoetic; it could be argued that pat and crimp are, too. So, yes, Erdrich has made strong word choices, but why did she choose this order, this syntax? Perhaps because the metrics of the sentence match the action. As we read it, we can see the woman's body and fingers bend with exertion as she puffs her cheeks and pats and crimps the edges of the pies. This is rhythm, but it is also a skilled mimicry of a human in motion. With smart maneuvering, we feel sentences like these in the corners of our bodies. If we want our readers to feel pulled into our fictive worlds, then, this is one way to do it.

Here's another: repetition. Tufte points out that it's "one of the easiest symbolic effects to create, since it is also a (basic) quality of (some) grammatical constructions... and needs no ingenious translation by the reader from symbol to sense."25 What does repetition tell us? That something is important, certainly, but also that it connotes persistence or permanence, the sense of inevitability. It lends a tone. But, repetition in language can also gracefully imitate repetition in life. What aspects of our world follow patterns? The sun and moon, the tides, the seasons, ever-flowing rivers, ever-barren steppes. And in our bodies, too-all of these organs that keep working, these neurons that keep firing. How beautiful it is, how powerful, to find language that molds to the rhythms of our world.

In the following example from the last story in Love Medicine, Erdrich creates a scene in which a young boy has claimed the name that he would like to be called. His teacher writes this name in bold letters inside of a heart and tapes it to the wall. As the boy looks at it, "the heart seemed to pulse. In and out...suddenly something moved inside of him...Howard was sitting there. Howard was both familiar and different. Howard was living in this body like a house. Howard Kashpaw."26 Through the use of repetition and italics, Howard becomes more than a name, it becomes this boy's heartbeat, and the sentence literally pulses with this deeper significance.

Finally, the technique often partnered with repetition is the final method of syntactic symbolism I'll address: parallelism. I could say many things about this element of style, for it shows up at one point or another in most professional writing, so effective are its parameters. But if we look specifically at what parallelism can do symbolically, we see that its balanced structure allows for many visual and rhythmic meanings. First, parallelism in a sentence suggests movement. The rhythm that's established by grammatically similar phrases or clauses often creates a feeling of rapidity and forward thrust.27 You might feel, for example, as if you are in a moving car watching similar scenes shift in front of your eyes: first palm tree, then oak tree, then pine.

Conversely, some writers indulge in faulty parallelism-a deliberate breaking of the hallowed rules. Why? To surprise, for one, but also to create symbolic effects. Unparallel constructions hint at unconventionality or disjointedness or any emotion that is not neat and easy. In her book, Tufte refers to several examples in which authors relate a "terrible experience" or an "unfathomable realization" by way of "fragments, short sentences, interruptions, (and) disconnections"-all elements that break away from the feeling of balance that coordination creates.28 If we take the previously described series of trees, for example, and suddenly end the phrase with a flow of molten lava, the break in the pattern would achieve even more emphasis and implication.

Here is how Erdrich does it. First she describes a boy already in a hypnotic, sleepy mode "watch(ing) the women in their blue nightgowns with the jars on their heads."29 In the next sentences the parallel structure, the pattern, becomes symbolic. The boy says, "They never stumbled. They never had to steady their jars. Their calm tread calmed him."30 They never, they never, their tread. Through the syntax of these sentences we are taught to tread lightly, to whisper, to experience this world in the same dreamy way the boy does. The pattern is broken, though-and his need for quiet and safety illuminated-when in the next line we read: "outside, his father kicked the table."31 How different it would be if the text read: "They walked steadily, and he liked that because there was nothing steady about his dad." This presents the same information, yes, but only on the surface. Erdrich's readers are lucky that she also sees the value of what exists beneath. And as writers, we're lucky to have such examples to learn from.

Let me close by taking you once more to a scene from my past: four years have gone since those dreaded high school grammar lessons, and I am now a freshman undergraduate. I'm sitting in an upper corner of the library on the quiet floor, bent over my essay on Keats, blue pen in hand, revising, revising, revising, that one last line. There was something about the final sentence. It had to be perfect. It had to make me tremble with pleasure. If I just move this here, exchange this word for that, or what if I-what if-how about?

I would have cringed had I understood that I was flirting at the bedpost of my old enemy. But there I was, trading smiles with syntax. And when I found it-the right order or the right word-I would look up out of that third-floor window and inevitably the sun would be setting like a wide golden flame, and I would feel such synchronicity, such power, that it was as if I was the one glowing, that language was shining out of me.

The word revision does not sound magical, does not hold the flair of an alakazam. And a sentence can seem so simple. But we know better. There are so many possibilities. Our drafts, those wide-open landscapes, wait.

AWP

Emily Brisse received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her essays, fiction, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Orion, Minnesota English Journal, New Plains Review, the Talking Stick, Roadside Poetry, and Minnesota Conservation Volunteer. She is at work on a collection of place-focused short stories.

1. . Louise Erdrich. Love Medicine. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1984), p. 37.

2. Joseph M. Williams. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 6th ed. (New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, Inc., 2000), p. 106.
3. Ellen Bryant Voigt. The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song. (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2009), p. 5.
4. Virginia Tufte. Artful Sentences. (Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press, 2006), pp. 26-28.
5. Ibid., p. 21.
6. Ibid., p. 20.
7. Williams, Style, p. 185.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 180.
10. Erdrich, Love Medicine, p. 22.
11. Tufte, Artful Sentences, p. 155.
12. Ibid., p. 169.
13. Erdrich, Love Medicine, p. 1.
14. Williams, Style, p. 122.
15. Ibid., p. 123.
16. Erdrich, Love Medicine, p. 4.
17. Ibid., p. 37.
18. Tufte, Artful Sentences, p. 271.
19. David Jauss. Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction Writing. (Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books, 2008), p. 73.
20. Tufte, Artful Sentences, p. 271.
21. Ibid., p. 253.
22. Erdrich, Love Medicine, p. 37.
23. Tufte, Artful Sentences, p. 254.
24. Erdirch, Love Medicine, p. 13.
25. Tufte, Artful Sentences, p. 256.
26. Erdrich, Love Medicine, p. 331.
27. Tufte, Artful Sentences, p. 259.
28. Ibid., p. 220.
29. Erdrich, Love Medicine, p. 329.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.