Advanced WritingSession Five

A Course By Nima Yousefi

Concepts to cover this session

Suspensiveness

Techniques to Create Suspense

Phatic Expressions

Sentences that complete the basic pattern of subject and predicate early on, keeping subject and verb near the beginning of the

sentence and keeping subject and verb close together

Loose Sentences

delaying its main clause until the very end

splitting the subject from the verb with qualifying material

using any construction that refines, sharpens, or adds to

initial information before putting it to final use

A sentence is termed periodic if it suspends completion of its message:

"Those who roused the people to resistance, who directed their measures through a long series of eventful years, who formed, out of the most unpromising materials, the finest army that Europe had ever seen, who trampled down King, Church, and Aristocracy, who, in the short intervals of domestic sedition and rebellion, made the name of England terrible to every nation on the face of the earth, were no vulgar fanatics."

- The Puritans By Thomas Babington Macaulay

"We can reason that the periodic style, like the noun style shows thought to be static, organized into its component parts and then flash-frozen; the running style, like the verb style, shows behavior still in progress, happening in the present, not the past. The contrast often proves a fruitful one but it ought not to lead us to ignore the powerful internal dynamics the period can generate. If you add enough internal qualifications and parenthetical interruptions, it turns into a running style.

Three Reasons for Employing Suspensive Syntax

1. Varying your predominantly loose style and emphasizing

your more important ideas

2. Putting the important ideas at the end of the sentence

3. Sustaining interest in a long sentence

In linguistics, a phatic expression is communication which serves a social function such as small talk and social pleasantries that don't seek or offer any information of value.

For example, greetings such as "hello" and "how are you?" are phatic expressions.

Phatic Expression

Phatic Connectors To be honest Let's face it Just between us If truth be known If you must know If you get right down to it If I may call it that I can't help but wonder To my way of thinking It seems to me Shall we say

Sentence Openers

Interrupters

Signpost Important Information or Claims

Clinch a Conclusion

Certify, Undermine, or Decertify Content

Uses of Phatic Phrases

An inverted cumulative works periodically, forestalling the base clause by a number of modifying levels, keeping the distinctive cumulative rhythm, but putting it to suspensive effect.

His eyes weary from the road, his clothes tattered and dusty, his beard long and unkempt, looking as if not only insects but small animals might be nesting within its scraggly strands, Robert Coover's Wayfarer, the enigmatic protagonist of one of the mini-narratives in "Seven Exemplary Fictions," is hardly a character designed to attract our sympathy.

Five Delaying Tactics

"A verb has a hard enough time of it in this world when it is all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German."

Completion of the base clause can also be delayed, by interposing modifying or qualifying material between the subject and the verb of the sentence, a splitting tactic that runs the risk of losing or alienating the reader, easily the least controlled or focused periodic form.

Five Delaying Tactics

Initial qualifying constructions lead to more complicated periodic structures, presenting information that becomes complete—safe to accept as final-only when joined with or reassessed in light of information in the base clause, a process signaled by opening words such as "although," "even," or "if."

If it can be proved that UFOs exist, and if it is revealed that the U.S. government has indeed hidden evidence of extraterrestrial visitors, and even if it turns out that Bigfoot and Elvis do not live outside its lurid pages, the contribution of the

Weekly World News to the history of journalism may have to be reassessed.

Five Delaying Tactics

An extended subject produces similar results, initially offering an infinitive or relative clause, bringing the sentence into focus only when it becomes clear that what at first may have looked like a complete sentence is actually no more than the subject of a much longer sentence.

"To come all this way, to arrive after dark, to find the village completely abandoned, Tarzan nowhere in sight, and the banana trees stripped bare left Cheetah feeling completely nonplussed."

- Carl Klaus

Five Delaying Tactics

The sentence whose message is interrupted by a colon or a semicolon, but inexorably deflating, inverting, or otherwise recasting that message by the one that follows the colon or semi-colon, often waiting until the last word of the second clause to spring the sentence's rhetorical trap.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."

- Winston Churchill

Five Delaying Tactics

"Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss."

- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Take Away Lessons

Suspensiveness

Techniques to Create Suspense

― Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

“Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.”