the oxford essensial guide to writing phần 6 pptx

(3) RHYTHM 227 x / x/xxx /x/x/x/x/ x The man was standing on the stairs and far below we saw the boy, who I X I X I X I X I wore an old, unpressed, and ragged suit. The sentence has one of the same difficulties as the first ex- ample: it needs to be divided more clearly (or at least its first two clauses do). But it also has a different problem: its syllabic rhythm is too regular. With one exception the sentence scans as a series of unvaried iambs. 2 The regularity dominates the sentence, obscuring shadings of emphasis. If the iambic pattern is made less relentless the sentence sounds much better: X / / X X I I X I X I X I I X X The man stood on the stairs; far below we saw the boy, dressed in an I x I Ixl old, unpressed, ragged suit. The changes—substituting "stood" for "was standing" and "dressed" for "who wore," and replacing two "ands" with a semicolon and a comma—break up the excessive sameness of the syllabic beat. Yet they leave pattern enough to please the ear. Furthermore, the clustered stresses now focus the reader's attention upon key points: II I I I X I I X / man stood boy dressed old, unpressed, ragged suit Meaningful Rhythm Good rhythm enters into the meaning of the sentence, not only reinforcing the words but often giving them nuances they might not otherwise have. 2. An iamb is a unit of two syllables, a nonstress and a stress, as in the word X I _ X above. The one exception in the example is the four syllables "-ing XX / on the stairs." 228 THE SENTENCE Mimetic Rhythm Mimetic means "imitative." Mimetic rhythm imitates the per- ception a sentence describes or the feeling or ideas it conveys: x / / x / / /x / x x xx/x/ The tide reaches flood stage, slackens, hesitates, and begins to ebb. Rachel Carson The flowing tide is suggested by the very movement of this sentence, which runs smoothly and uninterruptedly to a mid- point, slows down, pauses (the commas), and then picks up and runs to its end. Here is a similar, somewhat longer, sen- tence about Niagara Falls: xx /xx/xx/x/ x/xx/x / x On the edge of disaster the river seems to gather herself, to pause, to /x / /xx/xx / xx/ / xx / xx lift a head noble in ruin, and then, with a slow grandeur, to plunge into xx/x/ xx / /xx/ the eternal thunder and white chaos below. Rupert Brooke Mimetic rhythm may also imply ideas more abstract than physical movement, as in this passage describing the life of peasants: / / / / / / x/xx/ /x/x/x Black bread, rude roof, dark night, laborious day, weary arm at sunset; X / / X / and life ebbs away. John Ruskin The six unrelieved stresses at the beginning mirror the dreary monotony of the peasant's existence. Then nonstressed syl- lables become more numerous and the sentence picks up speed and runs to a close, just as life slips away (in Ruskin's view) from the peasant before he has held and savored it. • Metrical Runs A metrical run is a relatively regular pattern of stresses and nonstresses. This is, of course, a feature of traditional poetry, (3) RHYTHM 229 but not common in prose. It is, as we have seen, a fault when it is not controlled. But used with restraint and skill, metrical runs are effective. Though not specifically meaningful, like mimetic rhythms, they make a sentence memorable and in- tensify its mood and meaning: x/x/x/x / x / xx / x / I love to lie in bed and read the lives of the Popes of Rome. Logan Pearsall Smith /xx/xxx / x / xx / x / x x / x This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with X / X the country. Joan Didion Smith and Didion achieve their metrical runs in part by using prepositional phrases. A typical prepositional phrase consists of a one- or two-syllable preposition, a noun marker {a, an, the, this, that, and so on), and an object of (usually) one or two syllables. Neither the preposition nor the marker is stressed, while the object (or one of its syllables) is, so that one of these metrical patterns is likely: X / at home X X / in the house XX / X in the morning X X X / in the event Such metrical patterns (or "meters") are said to be rising since the stress comes at or near the end. By adding modifiers or doubling the objects of a preposition or stringing together several phrases, it is possible to sustain a rising pattern over the whole or a portion of a sentence: XX / X /XX I % I about love and death in the golden land Sometimes a metrical run occurs at the end of a sentence, bringing it neatly to a close: 230 THE SENTENCE Smoke lowering from chimneypots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full grown snow-flakes—gone into XX / X X / mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Charles Dickens / x x Beyond the blue hills, within riding distance, there is a country of /x /xx/ x x I I parks and beeches with views of the far-off sea. Logan Pearsall Smith There was the sea, sheer under me, and it looked grey and grim, x / xx /xx/x and streaked with the white of our smother. John Masefield To work at all, metrical runs must be uncommon. Their effect is subtly to draw our attention. Responding uncon- sciously to the rhythm, we feel that a sentence is important and we are more likely to remember it. Certainly a metrical run will not dignify something silly, but it will help us to think about something important. Rhythmic Breaks One advantage of maintaining a fairly regular rhythm is that you can alter it for special effect: x/xx/xx/ ?/ I xx I The roses have faded at Malmaison, nipped by the frost. Amy Lowell There are four rising meters up to the comma, then an un- expected stress upon "nipped," which throws great weight upon that word, making it the center of the sentence. And it is a key word, for the sentence alludes to the sad story of Josephine, Napoleon's first wife, who was divorced by him for political reasons and who retired to her palatial home of Malmaison, famous for its roses. And look, finally, once again at the sentence by Logan Pearsall Smith, quoted above: (3) RHYTHM 23I x/x' / / xx/x/x xxx / x x / Beyond the blue hills, within riding distance, there is a country of parks X / XX / XX/// and beeches with views of the far-off sea. The rising meters which run throughout most of the sentence abruptly change at the end to three clustered stresses, making the "far-off sea" the climax of the vision. Rhyme Rhyme is the repetition of sounds in positions close enough to be noticed. It is not an aspect of rhythm; even so we shall glance at it. We associate rhyme chiefly with poetry, espe- cially in the form of end rhyme—the closing of successive or alternate lines with the same sound: The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Andrew Marveil Poetry also often uses inner rhyme—repeating sounds within a line, as with the a and i vowels and the p's of Marvell's first line. Despite its association with poetry, rhyme occurs in prose, usually as inner rhyme (prose writers rarely end sentences or clauses with the same sound). Like rhythm, rhyme can affect the ear both pleasantly and unpleasantly, and it can enhance meaning. It seems unlikely that sounds have inherent, culture-free significance in themselves. Particular sounds may acquire loose meanings; for example, we seem to associate the ee sound with smallness (teeny, weeny). But psychologists who have studied this phenomenon think that such "meanings" are culturally conditioned and will vary from one group to another. Even if language sounds do not possess inherent universal meanings, it remains the fact that within a particular culture certain sounds can evoke particular attitudes. Even here, 232 THE SENTENCE however, one must be careful in talking about "meaning." Such meaning is broad and resists precise interpretation. In the following description by Mark Twain of a town on the Mississippi, the frequent / sounds, the s's, the m's, and the n's probably contribute to the sense of peace and quiet. Words like lull, lullaby, loll, slow, silent, ssh, shush, and hush have con- ditioned us to associate those sounds with quietness. But that is about all we can say. After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a sum- mer's morning; the streets empty or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint- bottomed chairs tilted back against the walls, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep—with shingle shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in watermelon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered about the "levee"; a pile of "skids" on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the "point" above the town, and the "point" below, bounding the river-glimpse and turn- ing it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. If we do not insist upon interpreting their "meaning" too exactly, then, it is fair to say that sounds can convey or re- inforce certain moods. They may also contribute to meaning in another, less direct way. By rhyming key words, writers draw attention to them. Here, for instance, Virginia Woolf intensifies an image by re- peating 5 sounds and by the alliteration of the h's and the c's: Dust swirls down the avenue, hisses and hurries like erected cobras round the corners. (3) RHYTHM 233 And in the following case the writer emphasizes "wilder- ness" by repeating w and "decay" by repeating d: Otherwise the place is bleakly uninteresting; a wilderness of wind- swept grasses and sinewy weeds wavrng away from a thin beach ever speckled with drift and decaying things—worm-ridden tim- bers, dead porpoises. Lafcadio Heam Yet prose rhyme is risky. Hearn succeeds, but the alliter- ation (and other rhyme) in these passages seems a bit much: Her eyes were full of proud and passionless lust after gold and blood; her hair, close and curled, seems ready to shudder in sunder and divide into snakes. Algernon Charles Swinburne His boots are tight, the sun is hot, and he may be shot. Amy Lowell Excesses like this have led some people to damn and blast all rhyme in prose. Undoubtedly a little goes a long way. But it 1 does have a place. The trick is to keep the rhyme unobtrusive, • so that it directs our responses without our being aware of its influence. Certain things should be avoided: obvious and jin- gling rhyme or inadvertent repetitions of sound that draw attention to unimportant words. More positively, rhyme pleases the ear and makes us more receptive to what the sen- ; tence says, as in this passage by John Donne (a seventeenth- i century poet who also wrote great prose): One dieth at his full strength, being wholly at ease, and in quiet, and another dieth in the bitterness of his soul, and never eats with pleasure; but they lie down alike in the dust and the worm covers them. Thus rhyme is—or can be—a positive element in prose. It is less important, and less common, than rhythm, but it is far from negligible. Too great a concern with sound, too much "tone painting," is a fault in prose (in poetry too, for that matter). Controlled by a sensitive ear, however, the sounds of a sentence can enrich its meaning. CHAPTER 23 The Well-Written Sentence: (4) Variety The Art Cinema is a movie theater in Hartford. Its speciality is show- ing foreign films. The theater is rated quite high as to the movies it shows. The movies are considered to be good art. student The Smith disclosures shocked [President] Harding not into political housecleaning but into personal reform. The White House poker parties were abandoned. He told his intimates that he was "off liquor." Nan Britton [Harding's mistress] had already been banished to Europe. His nerve was shaken. He lost his taste for revelry. The plans for the Alaska trip were radically revised. Instead of an itin- erant whoopee, it was now to be a serious political mission. Samuel Hopkins Adams Both of those passages consist chiefly of short, simple sen- tences. The first uses them poorly, the second effectively. Where does the difference lie? The first writer has not grasped the twin principles of recurrence and variety which govern sentence style. Adams, a professional author, understands them very well. Recurrence means repeating a basic sentence pattern. Va- riety means changing the pattern. Paradoxical as it sounds, good sentence style must do both. Enough sameness must appear in the sentences to make the writing seem all of a piece; enough difference to create interest. (4) VARIETY 23 5 How much recurrence, how much variety depend on sub- ject and purpose. For instance, when you repeat the same point or develop a series of parallel ideas, the similarity of subject justifies—and is enhanced by—similarity of sentence structure. Thus Adams repeats the same pattern in his second through seventh sentences because they have much the same content, detailing the steps President Harding took to divert the scandal threatening his administration. Here the recurrent style evolves from the subject. In the other passage, however, the writer makes no such connection between style and subject, and so the recurrence seems awkward and monotonous. The ideas expressed in the separate sentences are not of the same order of value. For example, the fact that the theater is in Hartford is less im- portant than that it shows foreign films. The sentence style, in other words, does not reinforce the writer's ideas; it ob- scures them. Nor has the writer offered any relief from his short, straightforward statements. Adams has. Moreover, Adams uses variety effectively to structure his paragraph, opening with a relatively long sentence, which, though grammatically simple, is complicated by the correlative "not but" con- struction. And he closes the paragraph by beginning a sen- tence, for the first time, with something other than the subject. Adams's brief sentences work because the subject justifies them and because they are sufficiently varied. Lacking similar justification or relief, the four sentences of the first passage are ineffective. They could be improved easily: The Art Cinema, a movie theater in Hartford, specializes in foreign films. It is noted for the high quality of its films; in fact, many people consider them good art. There is still recurrence: in effect the passage consists of three similar short clauses plus an appositive. But now there is more variety. In the first sentence an appositive interrupts subject 236 THE SENTENCE and verb; in the second there are two clauses instead of one, the latter opening with the phrase "in fact." Subordinating the information about Hartford also keeps the focus where it belongs, on the films. Of course, in composing a sentence that differs from others, a writer is more concerned with emphasis than with variety. But if it is usually a by-product, variety is nonetheless im- portant, an essential condition of interesting, readable prose. Let us consider, then, a few ways in which variety may be attained. Changing Sentence Length and Pattern From the beginning she had known what she wanted, and pro- ceeded single-minded, with the force of a steam engine towards her goal. There was never a moment's doubt or regret. She wanted the East; and from the moment she set eyes on Richard Burton, with his dark Arabic face, his "questing panther eyes," he was, for her, that lodestar East, the embodiment of all her thoughts. Man and land were identified. Lesley Blanch It is not necessary, or even desirable, to maintain a strict alternation of long and short statements. You need only an occasional brief sentence to change the pace of predominately long ones, or a long sentence now and then in a passage com- posed chiefly of short ones: We took a hair-raising taxi ride into the city. The rush-hour traffic of Bombay is a nightmare—not from dementia, as in Tokyo; nor from exuberance, as in Rome; not from malice, as in Paris; it is a chaos rooted in years of practiced confusion, absentmindedness, selfishness, inertia, and an incomplete understanding of mechanics. There are no discernible rules. James Cameron Dave Beck was hurt. Dave Beck was indignant. He took the fifth amendment when he was questioned and was forced off the ex- ecutive board of the AFL-CIO, but he retained enough control of his own union treasury to hire a stockade of lawyers to protect him. [...]... purpose may be to signify something—that is, to refer to an object or person other than the writer, to an abstract conception such as "democracy," or to a thought or feeling in the writer's mind On the other hand, the purpose may be to induce a particular response in the readers' minds or to establish an appropriate relationship between the writer and those readers We shall consider each of these three... acknowledge the latter, they will add to the effectiveness of any piece of writing In exposition, however, such diction, while important, necessarily remains infrequent The Directive Mode of Meaning The last of the three modes of meaning relates to the readertopic side of the communication triangle Here you select words primarily for their value in assisting readers to understand or feel about the topic... tries to become F L Lucas When we look more closely at this craft of philosophic expression, we find to our relief that it is less exacting than the art of the true man of letters Brand Blanshard Any words, then, that refer to the writer in the role of writer or to the reader in the role of reader operate in the interpersonal mode of meaning To the degree that such words create an attractive image of the. .. a bit further into this matter it will help to look at a well-known diagram called the "communication triangle": The diagram simply clarifies the fact that any act of communication involves three things: someone who communicates (for our purposes, a writer); something the communication is about (the topic); and someone to whom the communication is made (the reader) The broken lines joining these elements... word But the dogma that words come to us out of the past with proper meanings—fixed and immutable—is a fallacy The only meanings a word has are those that the speakers of the language choose to give it If enough speakers of English use disinterested to mean "uninterested," then by definition they have given that meaning to the word Those who take a conservative attitude toward language have the right,... becoming familiar with the contexts in which the word is used Context means the surroundings of a word In a narrow sense, context is the other terms in the phrase, clause, sentence—a word's immediate linguistic environment More broadly, context comprises all the other words in the passage, even the entire essay or book It widens further to include a composition's relation to other works, why it was... Cleverly combining strong macho connotations with others of sophistication and elegance, the name is intended to overcome masculine resistance to toiletries as "sissy" (or perhaps to appeal to women, who buy most of these products for their men).3 Emotionally loaded diction is also the stock-in-trade of the political propagandist The Marxist who writes of "the bourgeois lust for personal liberty" uses bourgeois... microscopes have genuine reference; they would help an illustrator drawing a picture of this father and son At the same time the words arouse the emotional response that Durrell wants in the reader Conclusion The relative importance of the three modes of meaning varies considerably from one kind of writing to another Scholarly and scientific papers, for example, make the writer-topic axis paramount; advertising... for reference, that is to explain the topic; a few solely to influence readers' feelings about the topic (Brut) Other words function in two areas of meaning: either primarily within one but extending partially into another (pinko, bourgeois, I think, young widow), or more evenly balanced (rat-like) But whether designed to serve a single end or several, diction succeeds only to the degree that it does... an end—enabling readers to comprehend your observations, ideas, feelings, and affecting their responses both to the topic and to you in ways that you wish To the degree that it fails to achieve your purpose, your diction fails entirely.4 4 A purpose itself may be silly or stupid, of course, but then the fault lies in the writer's conception—what he or she wants to say—not in the diction— how it is said . because they have much the same content, detailing the steps President Harding took to divert the scandal threatening his administration. Here the recurrent style evolves from the subject. In the other. is, to refer to an object or person other than the writer, to an abstract conception such as "democracy," or to a thought or feeling in the writer's mind. On the other hand, the. or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its