I may have found my intellectual soul mate. Her name is Virginia Tufte, and in 1971, the
year after I graduated from college, she wrote a book titled “Grammar as
Style.” Now, 36 years later, she’s
produced a new version — with hundreds of contemporary examples of
good writing — under the title “Artful Sentences:
Syntax as Style.“
I have not yet finished the book, but I am most excited by
it. While it is written at a high
technical level — the kind of thing you’d study in a graduate course on the
structure of English — it is filled with persuasive observations and advice.
Here’s a paragraph about short sentences:
Ideas about the building of paragraphs from sentences
usually concern ‘topic sentences’ and the ordering of ‘subordinate ideas.’ Yet accomplished writers usually seem to have
something else in mind when deciding how to put sentences together: the better the writers, of fiction and
nonfiction alike, the more they tend to vary their sentence lengths. And they do it as dramatically as possible.
Time and again the shortest sentence in a professional paragraph is brought up
against the longest, or at least lodges among some much longer. This smallest
sentence is often a basic sentence both grammatically and semantically, stating
in simplest terms the central idea of the paragraph. … Narrative prose may be
fashioned on a somewhat different principle, a more dramatic one. It is still
disposed into paragraphs most of the time, but short sentences when they do
appear are less often a condensation of the topic than some narrowed, relaxed
point of departure or a slamming start, a later point of rest, an abrupt turn
or climax, or a simple close. Either
way, however, as a topic sentence or as a kind of syntactic punctuation, a very
short sentence can be effective.
As an illustration, Tufte chooses a paragraph by F. Scott
Fitzgerald from “This Side of Paradise”:
The silence of the theater behind him ended with a curious
snapping sound, followed by the heavy roaring of a rising crowd and the
interlaced clatter of many voices. The
matinee was over.
The short sentence brings the action to a close.
Perhaps that’s a new Writing Tool: After a series of longer sentences, bring
the action to a dramatic close with a short one.
I’ll be reporting more to you from the ideas of Virginia Tufte. — RPC
