Subverting expectations with your sentences

• Sentence structure
• Delight and surprise at every turn.
• Noun-verb descriptions get tiring
• Articulate defense of choices
• Compelling narrative, but also compelling way of telling that narrative
• Understand temperaments, learn definitions, implement variety, learn fragments, articulate decisions, acknowledge revision, produce writing
• Gregory Orr’s Four Temperaments:
  • A good poem has two (concrete), a great poem has all four
  • Form: The way the writing is constructed (concrete)
    • Literal forms
  • Narrative: the story (concrete)
    • Speaker/POV
    • Plot
    • Characters
  • Music: the way it sounds (lyric/imagination)
    • Meter/scansion/prosody
    • Alliteration, consonance
    • Rhyme
  • Imagination: the magic that the writer brings (lyric/imagination)
    • Simile/metaphor
    • School (surrealism, minimalism)
    • Magic
  • Today focused on syntax
• Cumulative layering and the appositive:
  • Bridge the gap from abstract to concrete, exteriority to interiority
  • Appositive clarifies the meaning of a sentence
  • Provides essential or additional but not redundant, adds context
  • Good for settings/moods rather than dialogue or action
  • Helps in identifying other nouns
  • “The tree, a jack pine, sloughed the snow from its branches as if it was waking up.”
    • uses language to imbue additional characteristics
    • using simile for personification/interiority
  • “In awe of the jack pine, I didnot believe it until I saw it, the bird’s nest hidden in its needled, benevolent arms.“
    • appositive clause at end
    • clauses are cumulative
    • unexpected adjectives add personification/interiority
  • Above: say writing about religion, using metaphor of benevolence of trees
  • Restrictive and non-restrictive appositives:
    • Restrictives necessary for sentence to function (e.g: including a name with a common noun)
    • Non-restrictive provide additional information, usually a separate clause (still imbues meaning or adds texture)
    • Cumulative layering: adding more non-restrictive appositives
    • Dependent clauses usually appositives, but may not add additional information, unlike appositives
  • A cumulative sentence is known as a loose sentence that starts with independent clause, then adds subordinate elements or modifiers after subject and predicate
  • Useful for putting the main idea first, then expand
  • Example of interiority, gives inner life of the witness (writer as witness)
  • Adds to informality, connection
  • 70% of sentences are cumulative
  • Variety to mix up rhythm of sentence (identify sustained rhythms as places to break)
  • Not really in dialogue, more for mood and scene-setting
  • Restraint: don’t need to layer every noun, just use to propel the plot or the readers
  • Where does the music show?
• Hypotaxis and parataxis
  • Hypotaxs:
    • convey logical, causal, temporal relationships
    • used for argument and persuasion
    • provides inforamation and background about topic
    • subordination of one clause to another, unequal roles in a sentence
    • not defining (at least not literally, but interiority) but expanding/building/exemplify
    • Adds motion (e.g: immediate sentence, then use to further immediacy)
    • Polysyndetons:
      • Figure of speech in which conjunctions are used to join connected clauses in places where they aren’t contextually necessary
      • Creates senses/moods (e.g: conjunctions in list to show abundance)
      • could speed or slow, not always the same mechanism
      • religious sense due to biblical usage
      • can create overwhelming feelings
  • Parataxis:
    • Placing starkly dissimilar images/fragments side by side
    • forces reader to make connections between dissimilar things
    • juxtaposition without subordinating conjunctions (never ‘while’, ‘that’, ‘until’, etc)
    • Can go between sentences/fragments
    • Asyndeton:
      • omission of a conjunction from a series of related clauses
      • accelerate passage and emphasize the significance of the relationship between the clauses
• Fragments:
  • used deliberately for effect
  • not just tossed in
  • emphasize previous sentence
  • building tension through hard stops and pauses
  • important to vary syntax
• Questions:
  • How much is intuitive vs deliberate? — Deliberate mostly in revision, intuitive in writing. In revision, can force it into consciousness
  • Are there styles that work better in certain genres, or are they genre agnostic? — Can span genres, but depends on authorial intent (e.g: minimalism, focus on plot, etc). Be strategic, be careful (e.g: if you have two compound sentences, consider a simple sentence). Use tension to speak about bigger/vaguer/more fluid things. Use tension to avoid didactic writing.