Writing: Virginia Tufte's Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style · 4:33am May 11th, 2015
Prompted by the impending loss of access to the library I was going to check it out from, I’ve finally gotten around to reading something I’ve meant to for quite some time: Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. It was on my plate as what seemed a decent first try for an alternative to TheJediMasterEd’s suggestion [1] to Bad Horse that to learn to write beautiful prose, you should study books on reading poetry, since I’ve always had more difficulty with poetry. (That said, I did pick up his initial proposal, Fred B. Millett’s Reading Poetry, which I flatter myself to believe I’ll get to sometime in the summer, and may pursue his follow-up endorsement of The Poet’s Rhyming Dictionary and Craft Book by Clement Wood as well.)
Each chapter is built around excerpted sentences, each used to illustrate aspects of the chapter’s topic. All told, there are over a thousand examples in the book, primarily taken from literary fiction and criticism thereof—there’s no shortage of Virginia Woolfe and people talking about Woolfe; or James Joyce and Joyce talking about himself; but the impression I had was that the most used work was Doris Lessing’s The Grandmothers. That well, however, isn’t the only one Tufte draws from. Popular fiction is used, sometimes in great concentration, with one extreme example a page featuring Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and J. K. Rowling, as well as nonfiction unrelated to literature, ranging from Jane Goodall on animals to recipe books and technical manuals to John Kenneth Galbraith on the great stock market crash of 1929. (I was personally quite pleasantly surprised to see his inclusion, just due to some of my other interests and background, but was then saddened to find that Keynes, who is often cited as the best economist writer of the century, was never featured. I’ll speculate that it was due to Woolfe’s heavy inclusion taking up all the space that Tufte cared to devote to members of the Bloomsbury Group.)
The examples used are generally preceded or followed by explanation relating the quotation to the theme of the moment, with the relevant words or structures italicized to better show their construction and incorporation into the larger body of prose. This is seen in the following segment taken from the section on ideas in dependent clauses:
For another instance of the power of dependent clauses to carry vital meanings, we go to an unusual twenty-first-century book that in its entirety is a close reading of Bob Dylan’s songs:
He is the one person who has to be at a Dylan concert and the one person who can’t go to a Dylan concert.
There are no author defined supra-chapter sections in the book, but I group them roughly in three sections. The first chapter, concerning short, simple sentences, stands alone. The largest portion of Artful Sentences, chapters two through seven, follows and covers grammatical structures that can be added to the basics: noun and verb phrases, adverbs and adjectives and phrasal alternatives, dependent clauses, and so on. Chapters eight to eleven concern methods of incorporating those blocks, with the chapter on free modifiers and branching sentences carrying a lot of weight and that about apposition being one of my favorites out of the first three sections. The last three chapters are where the style is most heavily emphasized, and seem something of a culmination of what has come before: “Parallelism,” “Cohesion,” and “Syntactic Symbolism” do the plurality of the heavy lifting where moving from the sentence or small sentence group to larger passages are concerned.
As implied by both the method of teaching within chapters and the topics covered, Tufte is primarily concerned with providing building blocks for prose writing. These blocks are largely tools that I would expect most authors and readers on this site to recognize, if not already be able to identify and discuss. Putting them to use is a relatively weak point, especially until later on in the book. Throughout, the heavy skew towards positive examples and analysis, though understandable given the LEGO philosophy that seems to be on display, in my opinion leaves something of a gap where some of the easiest teaching—rules of thumb on what to avoid, or at least thoughtfully consider before using—would lie. Which isn’t to say that it is entirely absent, just sparse and downplayed.
Consuming Artful Sentences was somewhat taxing, and I would often find myself looking back to the explanatory passage after reading a quoted example, then the quotation again; I would not endorse it as light reading, or at any rate as appropriate for a mind in need of caffeine. Just as individual pieces of the book are benefitted by repeated reading on a given pass, I suspect that the work as a whole is one which would reward a second or third study, some months after the first, with the student working to apply its lessons (whether in making or enjoying prose) in the interim. Likewise, thanks to its index of terms I could see using for reference purposes, but have to assume that something denser and more structured would better serve in that capacity.
Ultimately, Tufte is fair in claiming that Artful Sentences (while it doesn’t go full Lobachevsky [2]) “offers models that can be imitated”: its greatest strength is in showing where others have succeeded, and breaking down, to an extent, why they did. But how you would go about deciding which models to follow when is an exercise left in large part to the reader. For that reason, or perhaps due to projection of my own perspective chiefly as a consumer rather than a producer of prose, I believe that it may be more useful to editors and critics—and, perhaps, authors doing revision—than writers on their first drafts. Most of all, she offers her audience the means for discussing prose syntax and its relation to meaning, tone, flow, which they may have lacked before.
Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style is available used on Amazon for under $10 before shipping. In the blog post that indirectly inspired me to try this book, Bad Horse said that “[beautiful prose i]s damnably hard to teach or learn” [3]; while I cannot say that Tufte—or I under her instruction—fully cleared that (damnably hard) bar, I do think that at that price what she did achieve in teaching, and an impressive collection of excerpted prose which was fun to read and examine independent of the lessons around it, is worth the investment in money and time for those interested in the topic, particularly those with a goal more aligned with analyzing and discussing writing than with writing themselves. I’ve ordered a copy and look forward to reading it again, after I’ve hopefully put its lessons to enough use to take yet more from it.
[1] >>2770499
[2]
[3] Bad Horse, "Understanding Fiction"
Now I’d like to ask a question of anyone who happens to have read all this: when you see the construction “and/or,” how do you pronounce it in your mind or speech? For example, do you read “We accept payment in cash and/or trade” as “We accept payment in cash and or trade,” as “We accept payment in cash and slash or trade,” or as something else? Tufte indicates the latter of the forms I gave, which I have never used, or heard used, and on that (certainly) awkward basis, suggests avoiding the construction even in technical writing. This was one of very few cases in her book that I took to be simply wrong, for I do not find the former pronunciation to be particularly unwieldy or ugly.
I read "and or", no "slash", nor do I either recall encountering "and slash or" before this.
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Thank you for your response!
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You're welcome. :)