Free Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon Page A

sockets and eyes were in a fixed infant-like stare.
    And her sparse white hair was short and straggling over her brow.
    If those propositions sound unusually specific to you, it’s because Tufte had extracted them from a sentence in
Memento Mori
by Muriel Spark. The sentence reads:
    He went to speak to Mrs. Bean, tiny among the pillows, her small toothless mouth open like an “O,” her skin stretched thin and white over her bones, her huge eye-sockets and eyes in a fixed, infant-like stare, and her sparse white hair short and straggling over her brow.
    Tufte, probably our most accomplished current student of sentence structure, is a big fan of adding propositions to sentences by adding free modifying words and phrases following a short base clause, noting again and again in her writing how this technique allows us to write sentences that can grow to considerable length without becoming hard to follow or unpleasant to the ear.
    Next Steps
    The Next Steps suggestions for the past couple of chapters may have taxed your patience with variations on “unpacking” and “repacking” propositions that underlie the surface wording and structure of sentences, but now it’s time to nail down the somewhat amazing fact that there are only three main syntactic strategies for making sentences longer: connective, subordinative, or adjectival (and combinations of these three strategies). Given the following six brief sentences, compose one sentence that incorporates all of their underlying propositions by employing connective strategy. Compose one sentence that incorporates all underlying propositions by employing subordinative strategy. Compose one sentence that incorporates all underlying propositions by employing adjectival strategy. Then, mix and match the three strategies to produce the best-sounding sentence you can craft that incorporates the propositions underlying the six brief sentences. Here are the sentences for you to work with: (1) The boy sat down at the table. (2) The boy was young. (3) The boy was out of breath from running. (4) The boy flopped down into his chair. (5) The table was made of heavy oak. (6) The table was covered with steaming dishes of food.

• CHAPTER FIVE •
    The Rhythm of Cumulative Syntax
    T his is the chapter I’ve been waiting for, the one where I get to introduce the structure of cumulative sentences, the syntax at the very heart of my approach to teaching writing. Of course, it’s misleading to say that I’m about to introduce you to the cumulative syntax since I’ve been peppering my discussion of the sentence with references to cumulatives and with examples of what they can do. If I haven’t yet managed to clearly establish the form these sentences take, I bet I have managed to alert your ears to their characteristic rhythms. Remember two of the cumulative sentences I’ve previously cited:
    He went to speak to Mrs. Bean, tiny among the pillows, her small toothless mouth open like an “O,” her skin stretched thin and white over her bones, her huge eye-sockets and eyes in a fixed, infant-like stare, and her sparse white hair short and straggling over her brow.
    They slept, the man simply collapsing on the bed, the woman first seeing what TV channels were available.
    Here’s a breathlessly fast new example from Ernest Hemingway:
    George was coming down in the telemark position, kneeling, one leg forward and bent, the other trailing, his sticks hanging like some insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow, and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow.
    Here’s a chillingly matter-of-fact example from Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”:
    His father struck him with the flat of his hand on the side of the head,