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Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read |  |
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网友对Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read的评论
In this book, the author elaborated what are great sentences and how to write them, which also help me on my way of reading, making my reading more enjoyable.
基本上是Landon教授的TTC课程Building Great Sentences的文本，它有助于观众对于这门课程的复习。课程中反复强调的cumulative sentences对于记叙文写作很有帮助。课程中提到的其他语言学家在写作方面的著作，对于写作新手来说，都很有参考价值。
买来和网上的视频参照着学。
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Reviewed by C. J. Singh (Berkeley, CA)
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The title of this book can be misleading: the book focuses mainly on crafting sentences for narratives and creative nonfiction, not for general expository nonfiction that typically favors concision.
Brooks Landon is a professor in the University of Iowa's highly acclaimed Creative Writing Program, where he specializes in teaching the "Prose Style" course. In 2008, "The Teaching Company" produced a DVD showing Landon deliver twenty-four lectures on "Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft." With the DVD comes an option to purchase a complete transcript and study guide, comprising 420 pages. I enjoyed watching the DVD. After studying the transcript, I recommended both to fellow apprentice writers in my MFA program in Creative Writing. The transcript, in a lightly edited and condensed version, constitutes this book.
In the first chapter, Landon writes: "The most important assumption underlying this book is that the same words in different order have different meanings, or to put this another way, style is content... form is content" (page 9). In the opening chapters, he cites several prominent style theorists like Josephine Miles and Francis Christensen.
Josephine Miles in STYLE and PROPORTION: The LANGUAGE of PROSE and POETRY published in 1967, wrote: "Prose proceeds forward in time by steps less closely measured, but not less propelling, than the steps of verse. While every few feet, verse reverses, repeats, and reassesses the pattern of its progression, prose picks up momentum toward its forward goal in strides variably adapted to its burden and purposes. Both use steps; neither merely flows; each may be perceived and followed by its own stages of articulation." (p 46). Landon notes that Miles was the first woman to achieve tenure in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Francis Christensen in his book, NOTES TOWARD A NEW RHETORIC: ESSAYS FOR TEACHERS, also published in 1967, introduced the term "cumulative sentence." Landon declares that "the structure of cumulative sentences, the syntax is at the very heart of my approach to teaching writing" (p 53).
Christensen cited a 1946 essay by John Erskine, a Columbia University professor of literature, as the inspiration of his theory of the cumulative sentence. Erskine wrote: "When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding.... What you wish to say is found not in the noun but in what you add to qualify the noun. The noun is only the grappling iron to hitch your mind to the reader's. The noun, the verb, and the main clause serve as a base on which meaning will rise. The modifier is the essential part of any sentence." Landon notes Erskine's taking a "wonderfully sly swipe at those writing gurus who put all their weight behind omitting all modifiers and confining themselves to nouns, pronouns, and verbs... tombstones give us our best examples of the `omit needless words' style" (p 58). No doubt, Christensen and, later, Landon read this "swipe" with considerable delight. ["Omit needless words" comes from Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style." Richard Lanham, in his widely read book REVISING PROSE, urges as a paramedic mantra to follow: "Who Kicks Who." Both suggestions can be very effective for editing bureaucratic and business prose.] (See my detailed review of Lanham's book on amazon.
Christensen describes the cumulative sentence structure: "With the main clause stated, the forward movement of the sentence stops, the reader shifts down to a lower level of generality or abstraction or to singular terms, and goes back over the same ground at this lower level." In a cumulative sentence, the base clause comes at the beginning and is followed by one or a series of modifying phrases. In traditional college handbooks, like Harbrace, such sentences are called by the pejorative term "loose" sentences, in contrast to the handbook's privileged "periodic" sentences that place subordinate clause at the beginning.
Landon presents many examples of cumulative sentences. Examples:
"A lamp was burning on the table, flickering slightly, casting a dim light on the shabby room, leaving the corners dark, providing no comfort to the lonesome inhabitant of the shelter, promising him nothing." Here, the base clause is followed by five modifying phrases, separated by a comma, each modifying the base clause. This pattern of modifying exemplifies a coordinate cumulative sentence. A subordinate cumulative sentence is exemplified in the following sentence: "A lamp was burning on the table, flickering slightly, the flicker animating a dance of shadows on the wall" (p 61). Here, the second modifying phrase modifies the subject in the first modifying phrase "flickering," not the subject "lamp" in the base clause.
Landon explains Christensen's four principles for cumulative sentences with admirable clarity: adding modifying phrases as a process of composition; giving direction by modification; downshifting through increasingly detailed specificity; adding texture to the main clause. Among the illustrative sentences in Christensen's book, and cited by Landon, here's one, by Sinclair Lewis: "He dipped his hands in the bichloride solution and shook them, a quick shake, fingers down, like the fingers of a pianist above the keys" (p 88).
Here's an example of an expository cumulative sentence by Landon: "Cumulative sentences can take any number of forms, detailing both frozen or static scenes and moving processes, their insistent rhythm always asking for another modifying phrase, allowing us to achieve ever-greater degrees of specificity and precision, a process of focusing the sentence in much the same way a movie camera can focus and refocus on a scene, zooming in for a close-up to reveal almost microscopic detail, panning back to offer a wide-angle panorama, offering new angles or perspectives from which to examine a scene or consider an idea" (p.91) Here, the first two modifying phrases are coordinate, the third modifying phrases is subordinate to the preceding; the fourth is subordinate to the third; the last three modifying phrases are subordinate to the fourth and coordinate with each other. Indenting differently the modifying phases as coordinate and subordinate, as shown in the book, makes it easier to understand.
When we place the base clause in the middle of a cumulative sentence, we have left-branch and right-bran modifying phrases. When we interrupt the base clause itself by modifying phrases, the sentence can still retain its cumulative character. When we place the base clause at the end of a cumulative we have a suspensive sentence. The book is replete with examples of great sentences from classic writers like Hemingway, Woolf, Steinbeck, and contemporaries like Pynchon, Oates, and DeLillo.
Granted, Christensen's book has become a classic among teachers and advanced students of fiction-writing; however, Landon's calling him "Father of the Cumulative Sentence" (p 55) is a bit much. Landon knows from his citations of sentences by F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, that the two, among many others (including Ernest Hemingway), were writing cumulative sentences long before Christensen's book.
Landon has added an index to the transcript and retained the exercises at the end of each lecture. I expected the book to be more tightly edited than the transcript of his lectures. On the other hand, retaining the redundancies of his classroom lecture format makes it more of a university course.
This book is truly a master class in crafting sentences for narratives inviting diligent study. Five shining stars.
-- C. J. Singh
I can't recall every reading a book that was so interesting, that I enjoyed so much, from which I learned so much, yet was so easy and such a pleasure to read. My enjoyment was marred only by his treatment of figures of speech, and by how badly he misquoted Winston Churchill, who said of the young pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few." He did not say anything as flat and banal as Professor Landon attributed to him: "Never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few." A few of the lengthy passages quoted to make a point are also rather tedious, but these flaws only prove that perfection can never be attained. But this book is as close as one can probably get, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wishes to transition from "professional/academic" prose to fiction.
One of the best books I've read on sentence building. The author shows you, page by page, the power of the "complex sentence". While simple sentences are called for at times, there are too many how-to books on why you should only write sentences with an arbitrary word count of "15" or something like that. I think the author did a great job of explaining the subject without making whiny critiques of other styles of writing he may be less supportive of. Compare that with some other books on writing, where the author literally has an ax to grind over anyone who would dare use those extended prose that are "self absorbed". This books shows you how relatively simple it is to build upon a simple idea, drawing out complex ideas through words a single sweep. Changed my writing.
This is the best book on writing sentences for fiction writers. It's an advanced prose style manual that teaches how to write longer sentences with grace and eloquence, sentences that enrich your prose while also leading to greater overall concision. I also highly recommend SENTENCING COMPOSING FOR COLLEGE by Don Killgallon. Both of these focus on writing sentences for narrative, using examples from famous novels and short stories.
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