Building Great Sentences Read Online Free PDF

felt the difference.” While the propositions in this sentence are very short and are simply tacked together by conjunctions, the repeated use of
and
to link these propositions taps into the emotional power of polysyndeton, the classical rhetorical trope of stressing the use of conjunctions where a comma would suffice, in this case building a sense of great calm. A summary of the propositional content of this sentence would sound quite simple, but the rhetorical and affective impact of the sentence is carefully designed and employs a sophisticated rhetorical pattern.
    â€œOmit needless words” is great advice, but not when it gets reduced to the belief that shorter is always better, or that “needless” means any word without which the sentence can still make sense. I don’t intend any advice I give about writing sentences to contradict the generally quite useful advice we can find in Strunk and White, but I do want to suggest that it presents a very subjective aesthetic. Strunk and White do a great job of reminding us to avoid needless words, but they don’t begin to consider all of the ways in which more words might actually be needed. My goal will be to explain why, in many cases,
we need to add words to improve our writing
, as Faulkner so frequently does, rather than trying to pare our writing down to some kind of telegraphic minimum, as is frequently the case with Hemingway.
    While I’m mentioning Strunk and White, let me suggest that we could all do a lot worse than digging out that tattered copy we’ve had since high school or college and giving it a fresh read. Then let me suggest you acquire and put on your bookshelf, right next to Strunk and White’s
Elements of Style
, Bill Walsh’s
Elephants of Style
, subtitled
A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English
. And there’s also another wonderfully irreverent critique of the Strunk and White bible in Arthur Plotnick’s
Spunk and Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Punchier, More Engaging Language and Style.
    Now,
impressive
: Effective writing is largely determined by how well the writer’s efforts respond to the situation that has occasioned the writing, the writer’s purpose in writing, and the reader’s needs. Most of us can agree whether writing is effective or not, although we may disagree widely about whether one kind of effective writing is preferable to another. Impressive writing is much harder for us to agree upon, and indeed, the implication of Strunk and White and a number of other guidebooks about writing might be that impressive writing—writing that calls attention to itself through complexity, elegance, or some other rhetorical flourish—is gaudy writing, overly lush, opulent, and mannered, and therefore should be avoided. What I term an impressive sentence will frequently display some form of “elegance” that may at first seem above and beyond the requirements of effectiveness. In his celebrated
Modern English Usage
, H. W. Fowler specifically warns against “elegant variation” in prose style, what he characterizes as the tendency of second-rate writers to concentrate more on “expressing themselves prettily” than on “conveying their meaning clearly.”
    I don’t want to argue with Fowler any more than I want to argue with Strunk and White, so let me say that I’m referring to “impressive prose style” in the same way mathematicians refer to an elegant solution to a math problem. In fact, elegant solutions in math are the most direct routes to solving a problem, taking the fewest number of steps, offering the solution that is seen as the simplest, neatest, or cleanest response to a problem, no matter how complex the problem is. Writing problems, of course, are very different from mathematical problems.
    As Jacques Barzun reminds us, “Language is not an algebra,” and there is no single