Free Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon

sentence. Much more about Christensen in the next chapter, but for now I want to keep my larger focus on growing sentences by adjectival steps.
    The first step in writing longer, more effective sentences that grow by taking adjectival steps is to start from a relatively short and simple base clause and then build the longer sentence around it. Chris Anderson emphasizes this point in his really helpful writing text,
Free/Style: A Direct Approach to Writing
. Like me and like Virginia Tufte, Anderson is a fan of cumulative sentences, and he puts this at the center of his advice for improving writing:
    Say things directly, the subject first and then what the subject is doing. Then trail the modifiers, putting the modifying phrases at the end of the straightforward declarations, expanding and contracting them, adjusting their rhythm as you need to, creating texture, refining with detail.
    As that last sentence illustrates, Anderson practices what he preaches, and his formula for the cumulative sentence, centered on adding free modifying phrases to a short base clause, explains how the cumulative creates both a conceptual pattern and a sound pattern. His sentence is doing precisely what it describes. Almost any relative clause can be boiled down to a modifying phrase that, if not shorter, is easier to follow than a series of clauses calling our attention to information tied to “that” or to “who” or to “whom” or to “which.”
    It may be helpful here to remember the classic Mother Goose poem, “This Is the House That Jack Built”:
    This is the house that Jack built.
    This is the malt
    That lay in the house that Jack built.
    This is the rat,
    That ate the malt
    That lay in the house that Jack built.
    This is the cat,
    That killed the rat,
    That ate the malt
    That lay in the house that Jack built.
    And so on, until we reach a final verse that could stand as an ode to the relative clause:
    This is the farmer sowing his corn,
    That kept the cock that crowed in the morn,
    That waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
    That married the man all tattered and torn,
    That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
    That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
    That tossed the dog,
    That worried the cat,
    That killed the rat,
    That ate the malt
    That lay in the house that Jack built.
    I’d love to know whether or not the unknown author of that poem was a frustrated writing teacher, but its cascade of “that” clauses certainly suggests that the author had gotten his or her fill of relative clauses—and so should we. Instead of relying on little clauses that have
who
or
that
or
which
as their subject and that tell us something about the subject, we should boil that relative clause down to a modifying word or phrase. Indeed, the author of “This Is the House That Jack Built” starts doing this, whether out of inspiration or desperation, in the poem’s final stanza. Instead of “This is the farmer that sows his corn” we get “This is the farmer sowing his corn.” Instead of “That waked the priest that was all shaven and shorn” or “The man that was all tattered and torn” or “The maiden that was all forlorn,” we get modifiers that omit both the relative pronoun and the verb.
    There are a number of ways in which relative clauses can go amiss, and their main claim to utility is that they are committed to specification. While specification is generally a fine goal in writing, we should remember that the rhetoric of specification is the rhetoric of the law and of legal documents. In her 1971 book
Grammar as Style: Exercises in Creativity
, Virginia Tufte challenged writers to use free modifiers to craft a sentence from the raw material of the six following propositions:
    He went to speak to Mrs. Bean.
    She was tiny among the pillows.
    Her small toothless mouth was open like an O.
    Her skin was stretched thin and white over her bones.
    Her huge eye