Free Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon Page B

hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horse fly, his voice still without heat or anger.
    And a great description of a laugh from Don DeLillo:
    He crossed his arms on his midsection, bent against the wall, laughing. It was a staccato laugh, building on itself, broadening in the end to a breathless gasp, the laughter that marks a pause in the progress of the world, the laughter we hear once in twenty years.
    I love the sound of these sentences. I love the stop-and-go rhythms they set up with each syntactic step they take, moving us forward, preparing our ears for what will come next, just as they add to our knowledge of what came before. And these examples contain rhythms within rhythms, setting up parallels and repetitions, balancing sound against sound, not so much the product of conscious choice so much as the natural benefit of the cumulative syntax, itself a rhythm so powerful that it encourages us to find other rhythms within it.
    After a while, you can almost hear these rhythms coming, knowing that a free modifying phrase starting with a participle, usually an
-ing
form of a verb, might come next, or an adverb, such as an
-ly
word, or a phrase started with a possessive pronoun,
his
or
her
or
its
, or a phrase that backtracks, picking up and repeating a word from the base clause before adding new information. In this way, we get cumulative rhythms such as:
    The chef prepared the fish, carefully, stuffing it with wild rice, sautéing it briefly, its sweet aroma blending smoothly with the other enticing odors in the kitchen, the fish becoming more than merely food, ascending to the status of art.
    Work with cumulative sentences and soon their rhythms become seductive, urging us to keep adding modifying phrases, their very sound reminding us of the limitless detail and explanation we can add to each sentence we write. That we now know so much about the cumulative syntax is a tribute to the pioneering work of Francis Christensen, an English professor at the University of Southern California who, in the 1960s, started looking at the way professional writers wrote. Christensen, who died in 1970, was an incredibly influential rhetorician, and his impact on the teaching of writing has been profound.
    Francis Christensen: Father of the Cumulative Sentence
    Much of Christensen’s influence can be traced back to a single essay, “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence,” first published in
College Composition and Communication
back in 1963, and then republished in Christensen’s collection of essays
Notes Toward a New Rhetoric: Six Essays for Teachers
, published in 1967. What so distinguished Christensen’s approach to teaching writing was first, the belief that writing should really matter, and second, that writing improves most obviously and most quickly when we add information to our sentences in free modifiers, following or surrounding a base clause.
    When I say that Christensen thought that writing really mattered, I mean that he saw sentences as means to a crucial end, much more important than clarity or effectiveness. As he put it:
    The end is to enhance life—to give the self (the soul) body by wedding it to the world, to give the world life by wedding it to the self. Or, more simply, to teach to see, for that, as Conrad maintained, is everything.
    His second, and more instrumental, belief was that traditional writing instruction had missed the point by advocating the subordinate clause and the complex sentence, and that “we should concentrate instead on the sentence modifiers, or free modifiers.”
    Equally important to his approach to teaching writing was his concern with sound. As he noted:
    [T]he rhythm of good modern prose comes about equally from the multiple-tracking of coordinate constructions and the downshifting and backtracking of free modifiers.
    What a great