Assignment 10 – Pace and Build in relation to Form

 

Exercises

This assignment affords you an opportunity to think back on the assignments you have completed so far, to perceive perhaps more clearly some of the concepts that have linked them, and to grapple in new ways with problems which may be familiar, but which point toward others you will confront during the remainder of the semester.

1. Take some object, process, or formal quality you know well and draw a distinction either between a true and a false instance of it, or between two different kinds of it.

(a) Explain the distinction in a paragraph of about 150 words using nothing but simple sentences.
(b) Explain the distinction in a paragraph of about 150 words in which you use no simple sentences. Combine the simple sentences of part (a) into longer sentences whose parts are linked by subordinating conjunctions. Try to deploy the relative use of commas and semicolons in a harmonious way.

2. Write a page paragraph of description, narration, or explanation, in which you introduce at separate points two sentences which are uncharacteristic of the pace of the rest of it. These two sentences–they might be short or lengthy–should in some obvious way run counter to the paragraphs predominant rhythm or flow. You must be able to explain why you place your unusual sentences as you do, and what the effects of their placement amount to.

3. Take a page which you wrote for one part of a previous assignment and which you and your tutor have agreed is in someway stylistically week. Revise this piece of writing, paying particular attention to the rhythm and pace of the sentences.

4. Reread and consider the following two passages of prose: the quotation from Samuel Johnson’s Life of Savage(see texts for assignment X) and the quotation from Quine/Ullian (see texts for assignment Y), which begins, “Most of us believe that Hannibal crossed the Alps,…” Write a paragraph of your own (perhaps about a character, or a characteristic) using either passage as a model for your own. Try to go beyond the mere substitution of other words for those in the passage you pick.

5. Think of a short process you are familiar with, and without moving into the mere transcription of talk, describe the process in two ways:
(a) in familiar, colloquial language–here contractions and the use of the 2nd person might well be appropriate.
(b) in formal (but not stiff or stilted) language. Here such stylistic markers as you employed in part (a) would probably appear discordant.

Examples

1) Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Pog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongy fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time- -as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streeets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.

(Charles Dickens, Bleak House)

2) Day after day passed, and the very air of Italy seemed to carry the consciousness that war had been declared against Austria, and every day was a hurrying march of crowded Time towards the world- changing battle of Sadowa. Meanwhile, in Genoa, the noons were getting hotter, the converging outer roads getting deeper with white dust, the oleanders in the tubs along the wayside gardens looking more and more like fatigued holiday-makers, and the sweet evening changing her office scattering abroad those whom the mid-day had sent under shelter, and sowing all paths with happy social sounds, little tinklings of mule-bells and whirrings of thrumbed strings light footsteps and voices, if not leisurely, then with the hurry of pleasure in them; while the encircling heights, crowned with forts, skirted with fine dwellings and gardens, seemed also to come forth and gaze in fulness of beauty after their long siesta, till all strong colour melted in the stream of moonlight which made the streets a new spectacle with shadows, both still and moving, on cathedral steps and against the facades of massive palaces; and then slowly with the descending moon all sank in deep night and silence, and nothing shone but the port lights of the great Lanterna in the blackness below, and the glimmering stars in the blackness above.

(George Eliot, Daniel Deronda)

3) There is a picture which shows him on the Rhine with two German girls and another corporal. Krebs and the corporal look too big for thier uniforms. The German girls are not beautiful. The Rhine does not show in the picture.

(Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home”)

4a) There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel and they did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room, which was on the second floor facing the sea and the war monument and the public garden where there were big palms and green benches. In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel, for artists liked the way the palms grew and the bright colors of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea. Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument, which was made of bronze and glistened in the rain.
It was raining: the rain dripped from the palm trees, water stood in pools on the gravel paths, and the sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor cars were gone from the square by the war monument, and across the square, in the doorway of a cafe, a waiter stood looking out at the empty square.

(Earnest Hemingway, “Cat in the Rain”)

4b) There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on the way to their room. Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and the war monument. There were big palms and green benches in the public garden. In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the palms grew and the bright colors of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea. Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of bronze and glistened in the rain. It was raining. the rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor cars were gone from the square by the war monument. Across the square in the doorway of a cafe a waiter stood looking out at the empty square.

5) Last night, for example, Ayatollah Khomeini was shown on television meeting with revolutionary guards back from the fighting and saying: “When I see these young faces, these hearts with all their attention to God–you can see it on their faces–I feel modest.” All present wept.

(N. Y. Times)

6) Yet I am inclined to believe that the great law of mutual benevolence is oftener violated by envy than by interest, and that most of the misery which the defamation of blameless actions or the obstruction of honest endeavours brings upon the world is inflicted by men that propose no advantage to themselves but the satisfaction of poisoning the banquet which they cannot taste, and blasting the harvest which they have no right to reap.
Interest can diffuse itself but to a narrow compass. The number is never large of those who can hope to fill the posts of degraded power, catch the fragments of shattered fortune, or succeed to the honours of depreciated beauty. But the empire of envy has no limits, as it requires to its influence very little help from external circumstances. Envy may always be produced by idleness and pride, and in what place will not they be found?
Interest requires some qualities not universally bestowed. The ruin of another will produce no profit to him who has not discernment to mark his advantage, courage to seize, and activity to pursue it; but the cold malignity of envy may be exerted in a torpid and quiescent state, amidst the gloom of stupidity, in the coverts of cowardice. He that falls by the attacks of interest is torn by hungry tigers; he may discover and resist his enemies. He that perishes in the ambushes of envy is destroyed by unknown and invisible assailants, and dies like a man suffocated by a poisonous vapour, without knowledge of his danger or possibility of contest.

(Samuel Johnson, The Rambler)

7) Run-on sentences, as you will readily observe, suffer not so much from excess length per se as from not knowing, as it were, where to stop, and celebrating the moment of greatest indecision with a misused comma, they can be long or short, but it is a brutal disregard for the completeness of each half which makes the whole run-on so unappealing. The British splice with commas where our rules won’t allow them, they have a natural ear for good style, anyway.

Then there is the antithetical disease.The use of fragments.  Insisting that they have a right to repose between an initial capital and period. Just like that one. But this isn’t expository style.   Literary, rather. What novelists do. When they’re trying to represent scattered thoughts.
Or talk, maybe. All the time. As if Or talk, verbs polluted something. A stereotyped convention. For representing talk. Or thoughts. You know. A cliche.

One should only allow oneself the indulgence of a fragment if the pace of the sentence–its length of stride, balance of clauses, speed of motion–is under perfect control. Then, perhaps, there may come a moment of tonal shift–a moment when even the pause and separation of a dash, as in this sentence, will not quite do. Sometimes a modulation into a kind of intimacy seems necessary; there are times when one wants one’s prose to move out invitingly towards one’s readers. To touch them, perhaps. As in this case, the fragment will be as effective as it is just. When you’re less sure of yourself as a writer, you’ll solve such problems by shifting gears, without letting in the clutch, into a different level of diction. You’ll use contractions and second-person pronouns in order to hold hands with your reader. It will look awkward if one has not been doing it previously.

A new convention of paragraphing has arisen among ad copywriters and many newspaper people.

Although supposedly giving a brisk, modern, taut and concerned look to the page, this device has another function.

A function it may not be aware of.

By segregating sentences from each other; by abrogating their right to assemble; by enforcing some kind of major dramatic or logical pause between them–even when the sentences themselves are well- constructed and reasonably complex–this stylistic manner handles the reader in a particular way.

Like, a child at its primer, in fact.

This device was originally developed for good but special reason.

RADIO ANNOUNCERS’ COPY WAS ALWAYS PREPARED IN BLOCK CAPITALS EVEN IF IT HADN’T COME DIRECTLY OFF THE WIRE.

AND IT WAS BROKEN UP LIKE THIS TO MINIMIZE “FLUFFING, OR SLIPS IN DELIVERY.

THE VOCAL AND RHETORICAL COMPETENCE OF THE ANNOUNCERS ALLOWED THEM TO INTONE THE PARAGRAPH STRUCTURE, IMPLICITLY ARRANGING THE ISOLATED SENTENCES IN COHERENT GROUPS.

But the implication of printed texts like this is different.

One ends up by disbelieving what texts like this say.

Assignment 2 – Of Pointing

Assignment 2 – Of Pointing

 Exercises 1. Re-punctuate (and re-paragraph if you think it useful) Francis Bacon's "Of Suspicion" (handout). Type up the essay, with your changes, and be prepared to discuss your revisions in conference. 2. Write "Of _____________” Your essay should be about...

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