Suspended Sentences

If you were an English major, you've probably heard of loose and periodic sentences. If you were an English major like me, you could never remember which was which, and many sentences seemed to be neither--or both. So I was glad to come across the concept of sentence suspensiveness (say that fast five times!) in a series of lectures on CD by Brooks Landon. (Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft. Available at many libraries.)

Landon suggests throwing out the loose/periodic dichotomy and looking instead at where a sentence falls on the spectrum of suspensiveness. A sentence is suspensive to one degree or another if it delays the main clause--the core of the sentence--until the middle or end of the sentence. To cite a familiar example: "Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go." Or a better one by Rick Bragg: "In a graveyard where rows of crosses lean left and right, where one-inch-thin headstones bow to the earth or tilt toward the sky and misspelled missives to the dead are inked onto rotted plywood markers, Cleveland Cobb spent a long time making sure he got the flowers just right."  Bragg's a good enough writer to trust that we'll stay with him on this ride, enjoying the view he sketches so vividly while we wait to see where we're going.


Suspended sentences don't have to be long--"If you build it, they will come"--but they tend to be, and they demand more from the reader, so they're best used sparingly. In his classic children's story Charlotte's Web, E.B. White starts a chapter with a descriptive suspended sentence and then switches to short, direct syntax: "Next morning when the first light came into the sky and the sparrows stirred their chains and the rooster crowed and the early automobiles went whispering along he road, Wilbur awoke and looked for Charlotte. He saw her overhead in a corner near the back of the pen. She was very quiet."

Readers and writers who prefer a "Dragnet" approach--just the facts, terse and to the point--are wary of long sentences that make them hold too much in mind while waiting for the payoff, but comedians love them. They know that timing is everything, that delivering the punch line too soon can ruin a good joke. Here's a typical Barry passage from Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far):

"Feudalism was based on a ladder typeof organizational structure, similar to Amway. You started out on the bottom rung, in the position of serf. This was not an easy job, but if you worked hard, followed the rules, did not complain, and were a team player, after a certain period of time you fell off the bottom rung and died."  The if-clause--a structure that always leaves the reader waiting for some ax to fall--strung out with four verbs and two prepositional phrases, all sounding factual and reasonable, seduces us into expecting a certain kind of payoff. But what we get with Barry is never what we expect. He's like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. No matter how many times he pulls the ball out from under me, I'm left laughing out loud. (More on the humor of Barry and Bill Bryson soon.)

When used carefully, suspensiveness can help get and keep our readers' attention.