The sentence: a word to life and back again

By Randy Koch

Wait. Consider this. Sounds make words. Some grind like gears. Others sigh like the wind. These, however, tick at timely intervals. They stretch out on the white page. They rent your breath and torment your tongue. Some, like "contradistinctively" or "antidisestablishmentarianism," require skipping across syllables. They bunch up in the mouth like teeth knocked loose. They're noisy as cymbals and tin cans clamoring in the trunk. Others -- like "silk" or "pot" -- perch like cactus wrens on the lip. Before getting too attached, they pitch off into the air and are gone.
Sentences, too, can lay over in Lexington, Kentucky, or fly non-stop to New York. They can be a Caesar salad, a Chicago-style pizza, or a meal in six courses. They can dip a toe in a puddle, float down the Guadalupe, or surf off Kealakekua. St. John knew the power of the terse, "Jesus wept," the two words filled with understated emotion. Arnold's vow, "I'll be bock," has now become a political promise, the words compressed in a muscular accent. Even the direct brevity of ET's uninflected rasp, "Phone home," can quickly bring on the throat-tightening sorrow of homesickness. While short sentences can say much in a few syllables, long rhythmic sentences can rise and fall, stretch and pulse. A punch in the nose or a skateboarder's collision with a wall deserves a direct line followed by an abrupt period. However, a description of drying laundry should string out like trousers, bras, boxers, and threadbare shirts flopping on a clothesline between tenements. Let the breathlessness of some continuous action -- a car chase or a dash through an airport terminal to catch a flight -- sprawl out. Do you gasp for breath from the bottom of your lungs and squeeze words from your throat when the sentence gallops on without punctuation? Do you hurry along, your eyes hunting for the period at the end, though the words reel out like a highway across the Great Plains? Herein lies one of the joys of the long sentence: the physical participation of the reader in the symbolic meaning of spaces, letters, punctuation, and words.
One of the great challenges of writing is, when confronted with a subject that demands an extended sentence, keeping the sentence afloat and pushing it forward on the gathering momentum of its own meaning, a skill that requires sensitivity to the logic and logistics of the content and recognizing that even though one can take the amateur's route to length -- hooking items together with commas in an endless list like crappies, sunfish, bullheads, carp, walleye, muskie, and smallmouth bass all on the same stringer -- other more effective methods await writers and readers who have great endurance, methods as simple as joining things and ideas with coordinating conjunctions, or adding details with an appositive, that syntactic satchel that renames the noun it follows or precedes, or using a relative clause, which through the power of the pronoun (such as "who," "which," or "that") pitches a thumb back at its referent and offers us news, rumors, gossip, or identifying information that may be either essential or supplementary, or offering an example like my tenth grade social studies teacher, Mr. Hillman, who routinely veered off into anecdotes about his experience in the Vietnam War, such as the time he and the other artillery men stationed on a hill above a river heard, during a moonless night, a sloshing and slapping of water and, fearing that the Vietcong were crossing the river to attack, launched a barrage of fire -- shells lobbed into the river and exploding in huge funnels of muddy water -- only to discover the next morning that the river banks were littered with the bodies of battered and bloodied ducks, or making a comparison, such as a simile or metaphor, which often adds another dimension to the writing by stating or implying the connection between the literal object (called the tenor) and the thing to which it's compared (the vehicle) as in "the face of the strange young man, who had suffered mightily from acne in his youth, was now cratered like the moon," or offering in parentheses an aside, a device often used by Shakespeare and other dramatists to reveal a character's intentions or thoughts or to provide the audience with more information (when Hamlet says, "A little more than kin and less than kind" in the presence of the King and Queen of Denmark, the words are intended for the audience, and it is assumed that the King and Queen do not hear them), or even using a semicolon despite the fact that poet Richard Hugo is adamantly opposed to them and points out that at least in poetry "semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation" and that "they are ugly," too, and while all of these methods and others still not mentioned -- among them the dash, the absolute, and the conjunctive adverb -- are legitimate ways of drawing out a sentence, ultimately it's up to the writer to decide when to lead the reader across a canyon of ideas on the rope bridge of the extended sentence.
Writers generally should not create sentences that are long or short, noisy or quiet, slow or swift unless doing so reflects their meaning, content, or emotion. Similarly, the order of the contents should help the reader understand cause and effect, perceive spatial order, comprehend chronology, and recognize a point of emphasis. If a barn burns down because Lenny dropped a cigarette in the haymow, first the cigarette falls, and then flames shoot from the roof. In describing Bridge I, you might begin with turnstiles, then pedestrians, cars and pickups waiting in line, and finally the entrance to Mexico. Remember that order or disorder in description, whether of places, people, or things, must be purposeful and contribute to your reader's understanding. Time, too, has structure, and presenting events in succession, whether or not they are cause and effect, will help your reader. Let the scene unfold like a film: "I looked back at Juanita; then, I climbed on the bus for Houston." Reversing events -- "Before I stepped on the bus for Houston, I looked back at Juanita" -- contributes little but confusion. However, while each of these considerations is important when organizing sentences, writers should always remember one last thing. Emphasis determines order: important details should appear last so they have more weight and readers remember them. Adam might list Eden's dangers as "fruit, Eve, and serpent" rather than "serpent, fruit, and Eve." The choice will cause us to perceive him and his perception of danger quite differently. A sentence beginning with the more important and ending with the lesser is anticlimactic. Such a sentence disappoints: "I especially miss white Christmases but also autumn's colors." The colors are an afterthought, a sort of P.S. to the sentence.
In her poem "Spelling," Margaret Atwood describes the nature of writing. "A word after a word / after a word is power." It's a spelling, a conjuring, a casting of oaths. It's attentiveness to the reader's pulse and breath. It's making meaning and designing its container. It's tapping out sounds and rhythms. Let's sign to the blind. Sing to the deaf. Speak though mute. Begin now. Write.

(Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University.)