Building Great Sentences Read Online Free PDF Page B

right answer to any given predicament with words. In impressive writing, elegance is indeed a matter of efficiency, but we need to remember that the problems a writer attempts to solve have an emotional dimension not associated with mathematics. There may be only one elegant solution to a math problem; there may be many different impressive solutions to a problem we address with language.
    There may not be that much difference between writing we find effective and writing we find impressive. The two may actually be inextricably wrapped up with each other. We might think of impressive writing as writing that is unusually effective. Both terms, however, are subjectively relational, having to do with the impact writing has on a reader, with the way the reader experiences writing, rather than being objectively describable
only
in terms of the propositions they advance.
    When we refer to sentences as being effective or impressive, we refer to what they do, rather than the parts they consist of, and no amount of sophisticated vocabulary or complicated syntax can make a sentence effective or impressive unless that sentence accomplishes the task it was intended to accomplish. Both Hemingway and Faulkner strike me as impressive writers because they’re so good at accomplishing what they set out to do. It’s hard to imagine the writer who could out-Hemingway Hemingway or out-Faulkner Faulkner, and attempts to do so generally seem humorous, as each found the impressive and elegant solution to the problems he wanted to write about.
    Grammar Is Not Rhetoric
    The final two terms I want to discuss,
grammatical
and
rhetorical
, are both easier to define than
effective
and
impressive
, and they’re more important. If we remember Steinbeck’s discussion of different ways of looking at and thinking about the Mexican sierra, we might say that grammatical descriptions of the sentence are primarily concerned with identifying its parts, while rhetorical descriptions of the sentence are primarily concerned with identifying that relational reality established when a reader reads or hears the sentence.
    Grammar has to do with relationships among words, largely irrespective of their meaning. Grammar classifies words by their function in a sentence, by what part of speech a word may be, how we refer to its tense if it’s a verb, whether a noun is singular or plural, and whether it agrees with the verb: The doctor
is
a woman. The swimmers
are
men. Grammar deals with the rules underlying our understanding and use of language. Most of these rules we’ve unconsciously known ever since we learned to speak.
    Some of these rules are not rules at all, but simply reflect majority values or practices, and can be broken without any real harm to making ourselves understood. Churchill slyly reminded us how silly it is to make and obey a rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, by referring to the things “up with which he would not put.”
    The
Harbrace College Handbook
I was required to purchase as a college freshman contains a “Glossary of Grammatical Terms” that runs on for some twenty-four pages. Included are terms such as parts of speech, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, participles, conjunctions, gerunds, and so on. The dirty little secret of correct grammar, however, is that it allows a writer to avoid grammatical mistakes, but the most perfect adherence to all the rules of grammar will not necessarily produce writing that is effective, much less impressive. Grammar describes the machinery of the sentence, but it doesn’t teach us how to make the sentence go anywhere or do anything. In other words, studying grammar is more than a little bit like counting the spines of a dead fish.
    I’ll use some grammatical terms as our consideration of sentences develops, simply because that’s the easiest way for me to suggest how to get our sentences to do some of the things we want