CHAPTER FIVE

Notes on Style

You may not have spent much time thinking about writing style. When it’s taught in English classes, style is often conflated with the rules of grammar that you’re penalized for breaking. For generations, this prescriptive approach to writing has undermined any sense of the creative possibilities of paying close attention to style. William Strunk and E. B. White’s classic The Elements of Style exemplifies this prescriptive approach. You have likely been exposed to a number of its principles of good writing, like “Use the active voice.” The problem with such advice is that it tends to simplify complexity and erase context. Strunk and White themselves acknowledge the limitations of the rule: “This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.” Even so, this acknowledgement of nuance hasn’t stopped a certain brand of pedant from mindlessly reproducing the simplistic adage “Use the active voice” at the expense of better stylistic choices. For instance, take a look at the following sentences from Maya Kapoor’s essay “Memory Snags”:

It’s no coincidence that most of these standing dead, these memories, are framed by the windows of my car. My car, even more than the sharp smell of junipers, possibly even more than the view of tawny cliffs stretching above canyons, or trails under puffed out pines, symbolizes outdoor escape to me.

The first sentence employs the passive voice “are framed.” It would be easy enough to rephrase the sentence, “It’s no coincidence that the windows of my car frame most of these standing dead, these memories.” This revision, however, would completely undo the transition to “My car” in the next sentence. If Kapoor were to blindly follow the rule “Use the active voice,” these sentences would not flow together so well.  

Other grammatical “rules” are not really rules at all. Prepositions are perfectly good words to end sentences with. And you can begin a sentence with a conjunction if you want. I ain’t even gonna mention some of them there other rules. The style of a formal report will necessarily differ from a memoir’s because you have different audiences and purposes for writing them. In all cases, context calls the tune. Any and every rule, principle, or guideline should be broken when to do otherwise would distort or diminish your writing. The trick is knowing what you’re doing and why. In these chapters, we’re focusing on creative nonfiction, but the same holds true whether you’re writing a poem, story, essay, or something in between. Instead of worrying about following rules, then, it is more important to learn how to understand your stylistic choices. For instance, in her lyrical essay “Beauty,” Wendy Gaudin’s prose slips into dialect: “Those white women on stately porches and riding in calfskin carriages: they hated them some Beauty.” The effect is a shift in tone to the vernacular, the spoken, the everyday. This effect is important and impactful enough that Gaudin returns to this phrasing in the final sentence of the essay: “Yes, they hated them some Beauty.”

Language is, quite literally, infinite. There is no end to the number of different ways you might write a sentence. The goal of this section, therefore, is not to be exhaustive but to point out what I think are some helpful elements of English style and syntax, which I hope will open the vast menu of options available to you as a writer. The goal is for you to become more informed and confident about the choices you make. Learning about style is one way to sharpen the tools necessary for making such choices and creating art, but remember that the tools themselves are necessary but not sufficient. Art is a subjective endeavor. As such, there can be no absolute right or wrong, as a prescriptive grammarian might have it, but you can still analyze aspects of language in order to understand it more deeply.

So far, I have used an important word four times in this chapter: choices. It might be true that following the prescriptive rules of grammar does not by itself make good writing, but you should still become intimately familiar with the way language works in order to understand the decisions you make as a writer, including the alternative decisions you might have made. Writers constantly make decisions. It’s easy to get stymied if you think about writing as a series of deliberate decisions, so I want to encourage you to think about writing as a recursive process. To create truly transformative art, you have to free your mind from the constraints of everyday life. Sometimes that means you must first make a big mess only to return to it later to clean things up as necessary, again and again and again. It helps me to think of all of my early drafts of writing as provisional. I can be bold knowing that if I later judge that boldness to be a mistake, I can always change it.

I’m talking, of course, about the revision process. I would argue that revision begins from the very beginning, before you ever write a single word. Revision is a state of mind, an attitude you bring to your work, a promise to yourself and to the art you are creating that you will care enough to return, reconsider, reimagine. Revision is not a single activity. It is a disposition that permeates your relationship to your art. I mention revision in the context of style, but it’s true about every aspect of writing, from large structural elements like plot and point of view, to the smallest of stylistic choices like punctuation and diction.

Here is a final caveat about becoming a better writer by understanding the choices you make. Sometimes you will make deliberate decisions about your writing. Should I start my essay with a scene or a summary of the narrative situation? What specific image should I describe in this moment? Should I include dialogue? You can answer each of these questions, knowing that you are doing so for a specific reason. You must allow yourself to make other decisions, however, intuitively. As an artist, constant deliberation and conscious decision-making might make your work stiff and lifeless. Sometimes you will stumble into the right choice. You have to give yourself permission to discover what you hadn’t anticipated in advance. For instance, you are confronted with the decision after decision: first person or third person, present tense or past tense, and on and on. It’s okay to begin writing, allowing yourself to go with what feels right, leaving deliberation for later.    

Exercise: A Matter of Form

The Canadian philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan is most famous for coining the phrase, “The medium is the message.” That is, the form (or medium) of a message communicates just as much as (if not more than) its intended content. Another way to understand this insight is to recognize that how you communicate something is also communicating something in itself. For instance, imagine a scene in which someone asks you what time it is. How would you describe the differences among these replies?

What do you care?

Noon.

Time for you to get a watch.

Almost noon.

It’s almost noon, mister.

It is 11:58 a.m., sir.

Obviously, the level of courtesy, familiarity, and specificity differ among these responses. Your style communicates very loudly information about your relationship with this person and the larger context of the scene. McLuhan’s theories about media are much more wide ranging than we need to discuss here. Suffice it to say, your writing style carries important meaning with it.

As an exercise in analyzing style, choose two or more of the openings to these essays to compare, describing what each writing style communicates:

Beauty only skin deep, your Japanese mother likes to say, and you wonder what she

really means.

Lee Ann Roripaugh, “Notes on Beauty”

Knit. Click click. Purl two. Click click. Knit. Click click. Purl two. Click click.

Kim Groninga, “Knot and Pull”

My parents competed for their children’s love, measuring affection through our ethnic,

religious, and consumer choices.

Leila Christine Nadir, “Cold War”

Though I usually only do it when he’s asleep or when I know we’re alone, my husband catches me licking our son from neck to chin.

Traci Brimhall, “Philematophilia”

In the beginning, there was Beauty. Beauty in the four directions.

Wendy Gaudin, “Beauty”

To describe the timpani part at the beginning of Strauss’s Zarathustra, you could say doom doom doom doom doom doom doom, and then you’d probably sing up with the trumpet part, as if a twisted brass tube could escape fate.

        William Stobb, “Doom”

Every artist, wrote Marcel Proust, is a native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten.

Sofia Samatar, “The Unknown Country”

The buildings of the Colony were like their history: sickly and diseased.

Matthew Oglesby, “A Quiet Procedure”

Syntax

While you certainly don’t need to study linguistics to become a good writer, knowing a bit about the scientific study of language offers a way to discuss differences in style. Linguistics is traditionally divided into five main branches: phonetics (the sounds of language), morphology (the formation of words), syntax (the formation of sentences), semantics (the meanings of words), and pragmatics (language in context). We may dip a toe into phonetics later, but for now, the most salient area of linguistics for our discussion of style is syntax. Knowing about the rules that govern how our language works will help you to make informed decisions in your writing. Remember, we’re less interested in prescriptive grammatical rules than the descriptive rules we can observe by analyzing actual sentences from published essays.

Sentences can be placed into two general categories: hypotactic or paratactic. Don’t worry about knowing these terms specifically. It’s more important to become familiar with the actual differences in the styles that they define. Hypotactic style is characterized by subordination, in which some clauses are dependent on others to form a complete sentence. Hypotactic sentences include subordinating conjunctions (e.g., although, because, while, and so on). Paratactic style, on the other hand, is characterized by coordination, in which clauses are parallel and equivalent to one another. Paratactic sentences include coordinating conjunctions (e.g., and, or, but, and so on).

Because its grammar relies on subordination, a hypotactic style tends to be more complicated, sometimes leading to what is referred to as a periodic sentence. Periodic sentences suspend the main idea or clause until the end. The complexity of the periodic sentence can be quite elegant, but because the hypotactic style asks a lot of the reader, it’s sometimes difficult to comprehend at first glance. This style may come across as less conversational and more learned or considered. Here are two periodic sentences from Alyssa Pelish’s essay “Something in the Woods: On Distance, Knowledge, and Enchantment”:

Here again are the “lofty oaks and lonely shadows in sacred groves” of the Romantic sublime—a scene which, when viewed from a safe position, can arouse in us “a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror” (as Edmund Burke puts it, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful).

In his account, The Maine Woods—which, as a narrative, has no particular course other than the one Thoreau takes through the woods—he is all the time remarking on the vastness and denseness of the woods

In the first sentence, a dependent clause (“when viewed from a safe position”) is embedded in another relative clause (“which…can arouse”), making it complicated indeed. The second example withholds the subject (“he”) until nearly two-thirds of the way through the sentence. The tone of these two sentences is more like a critical essay, during which Pelish lays historical groundwork for a larger point she is trying to make.

The following periodic sentence from Sofia Samatar’s “The Unknown Country” also suspends the main idea until the end:

How to understand this intimacy, which must have been in place from the start, whole, like a process of cell division waiting to be unleashed, how to understand her love for Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, it’s like trying to understand the origin of life itself, it’s enough to make you overturn the projector.

Notice how many times this sentence interrupts one thought to add more depth and context to a key idea. Samatar still uses parallel structures through repetitions (“How to understand….how to understand,” “it’s like trying….it’s enough”), but the prevalence of the dependent clauses makes this sentence more hypotactic than paratactic. The following example from Matthew Oglesby’s “A Quiet Procedure” begins with two dependent clauses:

Founded in 1910 and spanning more than a thousand acres in the rolling foothills overlooking Lynchburg, the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded was, for many years, a central landmark of the American eugenics movement, which stretched

from the early 1900s until the late 1930s—and in some cases, beyond—with long lasting (and now mostly forgotten) consequences.

The periodic style often allows you to write long sentences that diverge from one bit of information to another, placing each idea into a precise relationship with another. The periodic sentence sometimes requires the reader to wait for a main idea, interrupting throughout. Notice how Oglesby, quite elegantly, adds nuance even after we’ve landed on the subject of the sentence. Periodic sentences don’t have to be long, however. The following example, from Tyler Dunning’s “Steel Reflections,” may be easier to analyze:

        For the time being, when I pledge allegiance, it’s to them, our national parks.

This sentence is much shorter than the ones above but still complex. Notice that we begin with an adverbial phrase, followed by a dependent clause. Even the main clause “it’s to them” withholds the main idea until the very end. To simplify this sentence (“I pledge allegiance to our national parks for the time being”) would sacrifice its elegance as well as the rhetorical effect of ending on the key phrase “national parks.” Compare Dunning’s pithy sentence with a similarly structured but much longer one from Samantha Edmonds’s essay (with a long title, too!), “An Incomplete List of Sad Beautiful Things that Almost but Don’t Quite Manage to Make Clear to Me How Anyone Continues to Love Anything Knowing Someday It Will All Be Gone”:

For a moment, when I hold kittens small enough to fit on a single sheet of paper, or when I cry in the sleepy soft black of my perfectly healthy dalmatian’s ears, or when on nights muggy and eternal (hopeful dear us) I miss my cigarette before I’ve even ashed it, I think I know too much to ever enjoy anything beautiful again.

In this luxurious sentence, after an initial adverbial phrase, Edmonds introduces three substantial dependent clauses before we reach the subject and main verb (“I think”). The effect here is one of searching for beauty before ending on a final sad resignation.

The other kind of syntax a sentence might have is parataxis. Because its grammar relies on parallelism, a paratactic sentence tends to be less complicated, leading to what is called a running style. A running style is usually easier to follow because it moves forward as item after item tumble forth, as though occurring to the writer in the midst of writing itself. Observe the grand paratactic opening of Wendy Gaudin’s “Beauty”:

In the beginning, there was Beauty. Beauty in the four directions. Beauty in the frigid and pale north where the pelican and the egret blend into the glittery frost; Beauty in the scorched and dark south where turtles take their sweet time, stewing in the faithful heat, and alligators swirl in shiny hot waters; Beauty in the rising plenty of the east, wet with the dew of eternal early mornings, of baby whistling ducks and cackling geese forever in their fluffy, untested feathers; Beauty in the dry and aging west, as gray-haired red wolves say goodnight, goodnight. Beauty in the limitless singing sky and in the rust-colored soil, in the cantaloupe rays of the sun and in the winding spine of the country itself: in Mother Mississippi, the water that birthed us all.

The grammar of this long sentence is established quite simply: there was Beauty. The rest is an elaboration of where we find Beauty: north, south, easy, west, the sky, the soul, the sun, the country, the water. The grammar allows the sentence to go on forever naming the places where Beauty can be found. The effect is one of abundance and limitless accumulation. It’s worth pointing out a common rhetorical device that holds this piece of writing together: anaphora. Anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or sentences. In this case, the repetition of “Beauty in the,” which then gives way at the end simply to “in the.”  

The paratactic or running style commonly takes the form of a series or list, as in this sentence from Sofia Samatar’s “The Unknown Country”:

He collected old prints, marbles, dolls, crockery, soap-bubble sets.

Once more, the grammar is limitless and could go on forever, listing item after item after item, appropriate for a sentence about collecting things. Another notable rhetorical figure that you can observe in this sentence is the lack of an “and” before the final item in the list. This stylistic device, called asyndeton, suggests that the list is incomplete. If you added the “and,” the reader might have a sense that these items are the only things that he collected, as in this sentence from later in Samatar’s essay:

Bessie Head loved winter mornings, rain, wildflowers, animals’ eyes, stars like polished blue jewels in the sky, three-legged iron cooking pots, sunrises, sunsets, Miriam Makeba, goats, and Albert Camus.  

The effect is subtle, but the “and” appearing before “Albert Camus” makes the list seem final, and because the list is long and varied, the “and” lends a slightly humorous tone as well. The opposite of asyndeton is called polysyndeton, which occurs when more coordinating conjunctions than are grammatically necessary are included in a list. Compare the following two paratactic sentences from Lucienne Bloch’s essay “365 New Words a Year: October,” one employing asyndeton, the other polysyndeton:

Solid ice creeps, grinds, shears, calves bergy bits, constantly deforming itself to maintain a balance between the pressure of accumulated snow and meltage.

Stars and planets and galaxies winking in the dark skies are remote realities.

In the first example, the list of verbs lacks conjunctions altogether while in the second one they multiply. The effect of polysyndeton in the second sentence is debatable, but I sense a tone of excitement and wonder about the infinite expansiveness of the universe. At the very least you can hear a rhythm in the sentence that would not have been present if it had been punctuated conventionally: “Stars, planets, and galaxies….” In the following example of polysyndeton from Whitney Curry Wimbish’s “Bloodletting,” the effect is not excitement and wonder but something like panic as she suffers cramps:

In time my body seemed to flush its entirety each day, a sensation like constant diarrhea, with cramps that came fast and sharp and unannounced.

Exercise: The Grammar of Style

Choose one or more of following excerpts and describe the writing as either hypotactic (periodic) or paratactic (running). Note asyndeton and/or polysyndeton, explaining what effect the syntax has on you as a reader. Then revise the sentence(s) to change the grammar from one style to another. What is the effect of changing the syntax?

In the desert’s desiccating air, plants tell stories, pose riddles, with what they leave behind: saguaros with their ribs, wildflowers with their seeds, alligator junipers with their standing dead.

        Maya Kapoor, “Memory Snags”

Then Lydia's voice stopped. I, too, fell silent. My face flushed. Lydia was counting, backwards, removing stitches from one of her needles. A handful of red yarn, unknitted, gathered next to her on the couch. The silence stood.

        Kim Groninga, “Knot and Pull”

The pages of my address book have so many scratched-out names and phone numbers and addresses that it looks like an army of inky-footed chickens marched across them, saluting marriages, divorces, moves, job changes, shop closures, estrangements, disappearances, deaths.

        Lucienne Bloch, “365 New Words a Year: October”

At twenty, the kiss and my speech about it was all arousal. The peck. The head tilt. The lean in. The smooch. The godawful hickey. The trail of kisses from collarbone to neck, from neck to breast, from breast to belly. The make-out. The Big Kahuna of kisses-the French.

        Traci Brimhall, “Philematophilia”

We are enclosed in a feedback loop of what we cannot change, an identity neither chosen nor bought but historically received, your search history and your birth history and your family history amplified and streamed back to you ever faster, bigger, simpler, more entrenched.

        Sofia Samatar, “The Unknown Country”

Out the window is a different scene of patchwork development from above, roads and rivers and farmland and subdivided habitat.

        Tyler Dunning, “Steel Reflections”

He considered the primer burn rates, the grains and blends of powder, the length of the wad.

        Andrew Jones, “Recipe for Reloading”

You gain the dead-mother weight of ice cream and chocolate candy and bags of chips—an apple, like your mother.

        Jennifer Gravley, “Proposing a World without a Mother: Grief and Creative

Nonfiction as a Sense-Making Tool

Here is the smell of stomach acid, sweet and rotten. Here is the interior, exposed. Here is blood and shit and mucous, deposited into a bag worn at the waist.

Whitney Curry Wimbish, “Bloodletting”

Show and Tell

Other chapters in this textbook discuss the difference between showing and telling in your writing, challenging the traditional creative writing advice, “Show, don’t tell.” I want to offer another way to analyze and understand showing and telling by describing three different modes of writing: dramatic, narrative, and lyrical. To be clear, there are many other ways that you might categorize different storytelling modes. (In fact, the classical categories would be called the dramatic, lyric, and epic modes.) I have found, however, that these three are more suited to the contemporary context and simple enough to be helpful as you read, write, and revise creative prose.

The dramatic mode does not imply that you’re writing about something important or sensational. Drama here simply means that things are happening. I like to frame the dramatic mode as a kind of stage where action is taking place. A description of this action, even if it’s only the setting, indicates we are in the dramatic mode. This mode, therefore, is equivalent to showing the action of a scene. Importantly, in the dramatic mode, we exist more or less in real time.

In the narrative mode, the writer is telling the reader about things rather than showing them happening. The narrative offers information and context. It summarizes rather than lingering in a scene. This mode, therefore, is equivalent to telling. While the dramatic mode happens in what feels like real time, in the narrative mode you can move as quickly through time as you like, jumping back and forth as necessary to orient your reader.

The lyrical mode can be employed in your writing at any time, within either the dramatic or narrative modes themselves. Quite simply, you are writing in the lyrical mode when you are paying close attention to the sound of language. In fact, almost all contemporary poetry is called lyrical because in addition to rendering images and communicating information, a poem is interested in creating an auditory artifact. If the dramatic shows and the narrative tells, the lyrical sings. It sometimes has the effect of slowing time down, often because the attention to the music of language might accompany meticulous description, either within the action of dramatic scene or perhaps a narrative account of one’s inner state. In the lyrical mode, in fact, you can pause time altogether and stay forever in a single moment.  

The key to understanding modes is that you’re rarely ever going to stay completely in one mode or the other. Good writing shifts modes according to what is needed at that moment. The following remarkable passage from the opening of Brandon Schrand’s “The End of Something” is a virtuoso performance of shifting between modes:

On the second night, the crew rolled in a bank of floodlights to blaze the shoreline, and another high beam to sweep the dark surface of Alexander Reservoir, the large caterpillar-shaped body of water at the edge of Soda Springs, Idaho, my hometown. It was July 1989, I was sixteen going on seventeen, and, like everyone else in town, I had been upended by the story. Chad and I were watching from his truck at the reservoir’s edge on the opposite side of the action, smoking Marlboros and listening to Rock 103 out of Salt Lake City on low volume. The sky was an obsidian dome and you could only see the stars and moon in the intervals between the sweeping high beams bright on the black water. Search boats trolled back and forth with their throaty motors churning in the deep dark. Crackly radio chatter carried across the water as if transmitted from another time. Farther down the shoreline, dogs barked in the damp distance and we could see flashlights wiggle in the dark. Lured by the spectacle, trout broke the water’s surface, trying to feed on the lights and the moon.  

Almost the entire passage is in the dramatic mode, but it shifts quickly to provide context with “It was July 1989….” Though subtle, you quickly realize that the writer is also slipping into the lyrical mode with his descriptions. Listen to the music of the sentence, “Search boats trolled back and forth with their throaty motors churning in the deep dark.” Can you hear the consistent off-rhymes (boats trolled, throaty motors), not to mention the consonance with the repeated /t/ and /th/ sounds? Can you hear the insistence of the rhythm pounding, beginning with two hard stresses (“Search boats”) and ending with two hard stresses (“deep dark”)? In the analysis of meter in poetry, these double stresses are called spondees. I don’t think Schrand is consciously thinking about poetic meter as he is writing, but I am absolutely certain that he listening very carefully to the musical effect of his prose.

Here is another example from Maya Kapoor’s “Memory Snags” of shifting gracefully from one mode to the other while also incorporating the lyrical mode:

I expect to find a bird’s nest in the hollow of the snag. Instead I find a pile of rusty nails and a thumb-sized plastic skull that grins at me when I pick it up. Hidden arthropods moan, buzz, creak against the backdrop of distant traffic’s shush and flow, shush and flow.

I move every few years for work, school, connection. I don’t have an intimate read on this landscape, a deep knowledge of this place. I could easily pass through the Sonoran Desert and its mountains with no clear sense of ecology or of history. But thousands of alligator juniper snags like this one dot these hillsides, bleached and splintered, memorializing the changing climate of the Southwest. In the Santa Catalinas, memory snags gather time in their broken fingers for me to see.

Rather than shifting back and forth as Schrand does, Kapoor begins in the dramatic mode then shifts to the narrative mode, where she stays. At first, we are in a scene in which she is looking for a nest but find nails and a skull, hearing bugs against the sound of traffic as she slips into the lyrical mode. The next paragraph gives us necessary information about her life, but you can also hear the the music of the liquid /l/ sounds (alligator, hillsides, bleached, splintered, memorializing, climate).  

Modes are not always so straightforward. Sometimes a piece of writing may straddle (dramatic) scene and (narrative) summary, creating what is called a half-scene. Take the following sentence from Traci Brimhall, for instance:

My son has also started to kiss, or so I assume that’s what he’s doing when he opens his mouth and plants a wet circle on my cheekbone, his imitation still unsure of itself, the orbicularis oris still too weak or unpracticed to offer the chaste exchange of affection.

While this passage hangs out in the narrative mode, telling the reader information about Brimhall’s infant son, we get the flavor of the dramatic mode by offering specific actions that occurred in the past. She covers a lot of ground by summarizing, but the reader still gets the imagery of him opening his mouth and the wet circle on her cheekbone.

Gabriella Souza’s essay “Connection” hovers almost entirely between scenes and half-scenes as she gives the reader a lot of information while offering quick snippets of scenes:

A man on my flight is named Gabriel; I am Gabriella. As we wait in a Mexico City airport terminal, he tells me that in his dream two nights before he conjured an earthquake. His sister from Oaxaca called to tell him how it rattled the ceiling, shook the glasses to the floor. “These things always happen,” he tells me. “In my dreams, people die, then the next day, it comes true.

The point of focusing on these different modes is to demonstrate that in addition to managing your reader’s sense of space and appealing to their senses, you also control their experience of time. If you are writing something that feels like it lingers too long in narrative summary, try including some half-scenes to offer the reader some imagery. Conversely, if you find yourself stuck in a scene, try reducing it to a half-scene in order to move forward.