COMPOSING SENTENCES
Aspiring writers are aware of the Roman Catholic Church and how that institution has in the past been a peace maker across Europe as well as the drive for empire around the world. But few, despite their chosen line of work, ever think about how Latin dominates our schools, particularly the teaching of grammar which is imposed onto the top of what people really say and write, defining what is “proper.”
When I was teaching high school English and in all the years of my own schooling, we never got to the end of the textbook where gerunds, participles, appositives, and other phrase forms were taught. And yet, knowing these, recognizing these, are what make graceful and powerful sentences possible and manageable.
The remedy is to buy a book called “Sentence Composing: the Complete Course” by Don Killgallon. If you have somehow managed to recognize the named phrasing alternatives, this is a book to teach you what to do with them. This will guide your skill and your style.
That is, if you wish to stay within certain parameters of English. Of late, in particular, many are admired for outrageousness, counter-form, and near unintelligibility. This is absolutely defensivable and useful but don’t do it for a college paper. It is the hallmark of those who have been excluded from that path but have become masters of arousal, using their passionate outrage to exceed Latinate propriety. They are the barbarians who eventually drove the Roman Empire out of northern Europe. They compose in ideograms rather than alphabets. Some entirely escape from words by becoming artists. They write the equivalent of jazz and metal rock.
There are other form-making ways besides Latinate grammar. The recent video biography noted that Hemingway was conscious of the music principles of Bach, as he learned them from his mother.
http://www.johnmreese.net/bach_concepts.htm
Faulkner went the other direction. This excerpt is almost a demonstration of complex Latinate sentences, the same as his. http://americanliteraturegroup6.blogspot.com/2011/06/william-faulkner-writing-style-and.html
“As an innovative writer, Faulkner is known for his experimental writing style with meticulous evaluation of the utterance, diction and cadence and scrupulous attention to the details of characters’ utterance and state of minds. He experimented intelligently with switching different perspectives and voices, including those of children, the outcast, the insane and the illiterate. Moreover, he is talented at the arrangement of narrative chronology, sometimes by breaking the time frame and re-combining it with whole new aspect. His rich and brilliant baroque writing style is developed in the extremely long sentences embedding with complex subordinate parts.”
The third of the standard American trinity of the Fifties is Steinbeck, who is my personal preference. But it’s interesting that despite their style, all three were progressive — seeking justice and romance in almost equal parts. In short, they were against empire and against the Latinate Christian empire that has claimed hegemony, though they were adept at the cultural side, enjoying fame and prestige. All were masters of the monastery-endorsed conventional Brit grammar.
Richard Stern, writing professor, complained that I wrote my sentences inside out. After a while I figured out what he meant, which had to do with sentence order — not grammatical structure but the mental image sequence that the writer wants the reader to follow. Not the words but what is behind the words. Do they need to know the time, the mood, the place, what already happened?
Killgallon’s book suggests four strategies for learning sentence composition:
Sentence Scrambling (Trying different sequences.)
Sentence Imitating (Given expert samples, try writing parallel structures.)
Sentence Combining (Making a string of simple sentences into one complex sentence.)
Sentence Expanding (Given a sentence, how might you add new information.)
In addition the book discusses the uses of sentence openers, subject-verb splits, and sentence closers.
Teaching high school students, I discovered that most of them — the ones who read — could learn these ideas easily so long as it was never called grammar. If the suggestion of “grammar” arose, the walls and prejudices went up. But it was much easier than teaching diagramming, another excellent way to understand sentence structure.
The next step after teaching sentence parts and their manipulation is raising awareness of the auras that surround all words and some phrases. Simply, it is the difference between “skinny” and “slender”. But the complexity is infinite, particularly for those who know several languages or who have lived in different sorts of places or at different levels of society. Particularly confusing are places where the jargon reverses the negative to use the negative as praise, like “killer” or “badass.” None of this is in the book, nor could it be, given how quickly such things change. The book is too early to note Yoda’s Irish trick of putting the end first. “Write I will!”
This is a “WORK” book to be read with pencil in hand and a tablet for recording understanding as you learn it. Googling “sentence composition” is not likely to offer a dang thing (I’m too old to say “fucking”), as they only mention the standard basic concepts that used to be taught in junior high. However, Killgallon and his wife have written books for younger kids and some schools will welcome them. Some teachers will not be able to teach them, because they have only learned grammar rules, thus much of writing is invisible to them.
It’s been fun on Twitter to watch people play “trope switching,” that is, combining indigenous stereotypes in satirical ways that the initiated will recognize but those who are ignorant will not. Here’s a good example:
Walking Eagle News @TheEagleist “Forged in the searing flames of righteous decolonization, this is Walking Eagle News: Journalism so deeply and utterly Indigenous, we can play Little Wing with a turtle rattle. [Eagle cries hauntingly in distance but it sounds like a coyote howl]”
The bottom line is that one writes as one thinks. Therefore good writing is always the product of good thinking. Emotion, whether negative or positive, is only part of thinking — important but not the determinative driving force. Making writing accessible to readers is the job.
