Stunning Sentences

I've discovered a little gem of a book that I recommend to any writer working on sentence craft. Stunning Sentences (Norton, 1999), one of a series on writing and editing by Bruce Ross-Larson, packs an entire course on style into 100 pages. There's little theory or rule-based grammar here; Ross does what I do--he finds effective sentences and shows what the writer has done to make them work. His examples come from journalism and business, where readers expect not pretty metaphors but hard information and expert opinion efficiently articulated. 

Writers can probably benefit most by taking small, regular bites from this book. Nine chapters cover broad syntactical techniques for improving sentences--Dramatic Flourishes and Elegant Repetitions, e.g--further broken into specific writing devices. I've admired many of these techniques before, but often with a vague, holistic appreciation; I can't always parse out exactly what a writer is doing that I might be able to add to my bag of tricks. Ross-Larson catalogues, defines, and illustrates rhetorical devices with perfect lucidity. Discussion is brief and concise, and examples abound. Here are a few of my favorites:

Inversion of conventional sentence order "to shift a word or group of words to the emphatic opening slot and to add cadence":

    Only in the virtual world of her fiction could Austen assert control. (Kevin Barry)

Repetition, here of prepositions:

    She has an instinctive politician's gift of connecting--to women, to men, to old people, to teenagers, to the guy in the Staten Island deli who took her order the other weekend after she finished a five-mile run. (Eisabeth Bumiller)  (And isn't the length of the final prep phrase, after the other short ones, perfect?)

Pairs or trios of short sentences:

   Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. (Vladimir Nabokov)

Ross-Larson's work is now part of Clearwriter, an online writing and editing service. After briefly sampling one of the online classes, I suggest you save a lot of money the old-fashioned way: just buy this little book on amazon. (OMG. I just called amazon old-fashioned because it sells actual books!)  

Revisiting Salinger

I picked up Franny and Zooey at the library yesterday, just in case I'm not reading enough books right now (the usual half dozen), and hadn't finished the first page when I found this gem: 

[It was] the weekend of the Yale game. Of the twenty-some young men who were waiting at the station for their dates to arrive on the ten-fifty-two, no more than six or seven were out on the cold, open platform. The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, controversial turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries. 

I could do with fewer numbers here, but isn’t that last sentence wonderful? Doesn’t he just nail the know-it-all twenty-year-old we’ve all been?

Back with more soon…