This is part of a series of weekly reviews of writing craft books written in 2019, later revised and collected in Kristen’s book All the Words: A Year of Reading About Writing. Read the first chapter or buy the book in our Shop.

It is week forty-six of 2019. How is the writing going? I have two clients who are using NaNoWriMo energy to power their revisions, which I think is a brilliant strategy. (One of them alerted me to some great NaNoWriMo sponsor offers going on this month, including 50% off the popular writing program Scrivener. Thanks, Beth!) Set your own goal for winning and then see how far it takes you. Maybe your goal is to take the first brave step of creating a file called “novel” and roughing out a character or scenario that has been kicking around in your brain for years. In a blog post called “Start Before You Think You’re Ready,” Austin Kleon quoted a question that the environmentalist and writer Stewart Brand asked of Brian Eno, who included it in his 1995 diary: “Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already — and all you have to do now is find it?” Why don’t you?

This week’s book, Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, came to my attention in a similarly roundabout way. It was mentioned in a tweet by writer and book reviewer Mark Athitakis, who notes that Lydia Davis raves about it in her new essay collection. I’ve been a fan of Lydia Davis’s prickly, tricky short stories for years, so Tufte’s book was immediately added to my list. (Davis’s essay collection is on there now too. Here’s a link to Athitakis’s review.)

Artful Sentences is indeed a treasure trove of wisdom about sentence construction. (My favorite one-liner from the book: “Parallelism is saying like things in like ways.”) There’s a lot of grammar terms here, and Tufte doesn’t generally stop to explain them, but it doesn’t matter. Skip along past her references to objective complements and predicate subjects and go right to her illuminating examples, which make everything clear. (The range and quality and number of examples suggest that Tufte has collected them for many years.) You don’t need to know what an appositive is in order to use one in your writing. You just need to imprint the structure in your brain. Read these sentences slowly, maybe copy down some of your favorites, stick them on a wall in your writing space, and make the structures your own.

Tufte’s focus on syntax – the order of elements in a sentence – sets this book apart from other writing books. She writes, “It is the words that shine and sparkle and glitter, sometimes radiant with an author’s inspired choice. But it is syntax that gives words the power to relate to each other in a sequence, to create rhythms and emphasis, to carry meaning – of whatever kind – as well as glow individually in just the right place.” Tufte treats sentences like living machines that can be assembled in myriad patterns to create predictable effects. She talks about simple subject-verb clauses that act as “kernels” supporting right- or left-branching phrases. She is alert to the degree of “activity” in verbs, according to their kind and placement in a sentence. She pays attention to where the “news” of the sentence is located (usually at the end but sometimes, with careful use of inversion, at the beginning.)

This opening paragraph from Rebecca West’s The Birds Fall Down illustrates a few of Tufte’s points:

One afternoon, in an early summer of this century, when Laura Rowan was just eighteen, she sat, embroidering a handkerchief, on the steps leading down from the terrace of her father’s house to the gardens communally owned by the residents in Radnage Square. She liked embroidery.

The kernel of that long first sentence is she sat. This kernel is dense and straightforward; sit is an intransitive verb, meaning that it doesn’t require an object (require is a transitive verb that demands an object for its action). The simple kernel can support phrases that branch off from it in both directions. Tufte points out that the branches in West’s sentence are “free modifiers,” which means we can easily break them off from the core of the sentence. We lose detail if we break them off, but we don’t garble the meaning altogether. Punctuation like commas and use of prepositions like “in” and “when” and “on” allow readers to mentally store these phrases in syntactical slots and thus easily understand a complex sentence. Note also that West follows this long sentence with a very short one.

Using free modifiers to build complex sentences is better than using “bound modifiers,” which require the reader to hold multiple phrases in suspension until they reach the end of the sentence. Compare West’s sentence with this one, from Earl W. Hayter’s The Troubled Farmer: “Neglect of this rich mine of information is due in part to the difficulty one faces in attempting to establish a suitable model in this area for modern quantification techniques that have contributed immeasurably to the formulation of historical generalizations in such areas as economic history and voting patterns.” As Tufte points out, the problem here is the thirty-seven-word noun phrase beginning with “the difficulty,” which acts as the object of the verb “due.”

Tufte, however, rarely shows us examples of bad writing. Her joy is to unearth sentences that seem like inscrutable little miracles, then take them apart and show us how they work – especially when they violate the ‘rules’ of good grammar. For example, this beauty of a chapter from Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street:

Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up after.
Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.

Tufte notes that the entire chapter consists of a series of sentence fragments, all of them built around noun phrases and all of them “in apposition to” – renaming – the chapter title, “A House of My Own.”

In each chapter, Tufte moves from simple patterns to complex and then metaphorical ones, showing us the range of powers syntax wields. In her final chapter, she explores syntactical metaphor in more detail, demonstrating how “the syntax itself becomes a kind of simulation” with an example from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “He watched their flight: bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flash again, a dart aside, a curve, a flutter of wings.” This is how writers move beyond “the arbitrary, the sufficient” to syntax that “seems not only right but inevitable.” Let Tufte, and the wide cast of authors she has collected here, show you the possibilities.

Fun side-note for serious book nerds: Virginia Tufte is, as it happens, the mother of Edward Tufte, whose 1983 book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information has the status of cult object among both data scientists and book designers. Edward Tufte’s Graphics Press is publisher of Artful Sentences, and the book is as beautifully and clearly designed as one would expect. It’s only available in print, and it was a joy to read in that format.

Here’s to styling your syntax, y’all,
Kristen

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