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Grammar as Style Virginia Tufte University of Southern California with the assistance of Garrett Stewart Extracts from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce are reprinted by permission of The Viking Press, Inc., Jonathan Cape Limited, and the Executors of the James Joyce Estate. Copyright 1916 by B. W. Huebsch, Inc., renewed 1944 by Nora Joyce. Copyright © 1971 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-133048 SBN: 03-079610-5 (Pa) SBN: 03-079615-6 (CI) Printed in the United States of America 1234 22 987654321 Preface Grammar as Style is a study of grammatical patterns and the way they work in the hands of contemporary professional writers. It is addressed to anyone interested in stylistic theory and practice. I hope it will find readers among teachers and prospective teachers of English; students of composition, creative writing, grammar, literature, stylistics, and literary criticism; and writers outside the classroom who are interested in studying professional techniques. Each chapter, except the first, concentrates on a major syntactic struc- ture or concept and considers its stylistic role in sentences from twentieth- century fiction and nonfiction. In all, the book includes fifteen major gram- matical topics and more than a thousand samples of modern prose. I have tried not to depend on old assumptions about style but to take a fresh look, through syntactic glasses, at the actual practices of today's writers. Although I have examined a fair number of samples—many more than are quoted—it may well be that in some instances other samples would have supported different conclusions. I hesitate even to use the word conclusions; observations is more accurate. The book is exploratory rather than definitive, and its method is more important than its statements. On the whole, Grammar as Style is meant to be practical, even peda- gogical, but Chapter 1, "The Relation of Grammar to Style," attempts some theoretical justification for the book's approach, and Chapter 16, "Syntactic Symbolism: Grammar as Analogue," also pushes somewhat beyond the purely practical realm of the usual textbook. As a college textbook, or as a self-help book, Grammar as Style might best be used along with its separate workbook, titled Grammar as Style: Exercises in Creativity, although either book can stand on its own. Grammar as Style identifies and shows in action some of the components and techniques of professional writing; Exercises in Creativity suggests to the reader topics that draw on his own experience, and guides him in framing his own writing on appropriate professional models. The prose samples in both books come from a wide range of good writers—novelists, poets, playwrights, biographers, reporters, columnists, critics, historians, statesmen, scientists, professors. In Chapter 11, "The Appositive," for example, the authors quoted include James Agee, Neil A. Armstrong, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Ruth Benedict, Joan Bennett, Truman Capote, John Dickson Carr, Noam Chomsky, Francis Christensen, Winston Churchill, James Dickey, Richard Dorson, William Faulkner, John Fischer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Northrop Frye, William Golding, John Hersey, James Joyce, Robert Lowell, J. F. Powers, J. D. Salinger, Orin D. Seright, John Steinbeck, Janice S. Stewart, Dylan Thomas, James Thur- ber, J. R. R. Tolkien, Louis Untermeyer, Evelyn Kendrick Wells, T. H. White, and writers from Consumer Reports, The Countryman, The Econo- mist, House Beautiful, The Illustrated London News, The London Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Radio- Electronics, Saturday Review, Scientific American, Sports Illustrated, and Yachting. Many of the prose samples were written in the past five years. Recent grammatical theory, as well as traditional, is reflected in this book, but intensive training in grammar is not a prerequisite for the reader. Indeed, the book itself constitutes a basic course in grammar, with the grammatical terms and concepts defined by the many examples. Most of the terminology is familiar and conventional. The concern in this study is not with the hypothetical "deep structures" or processes by which syn- tactic forms have come into being, important as these are, but rather with the manifest structures of English sentences, the structures that actually appear in modern prose. Whether he is aware of it or not, any reader of this book already has a built-in understanding of grammatical patterns. All of us are able to comprehend literally millions of spoken or written sentences we have never heard or seen before—simple sentences and complicated ones, fact and fiction, prose and poetry. We are able to understand each new sentence only because all English sentences are built on a limited number of stand- ard patterns. Most of us comprehend a good many patterns that we do not ourselves use, or that we use in only a minimal way. We admire the style of our favorite authors, but few of us have tried to do what this book proposes—to take an analytical look at the professionals' work and then compose our own sentences on their models. It is probably true that many gifted writers do not know the names of the grammatical structures they use. They know what they want to say and how they want the sentence to sound, and they choose and arrange the com- ponents almost instinctively. They compose by ear. Other good writers consciously manipulate sentence forms and parts, altering, editing, per- fecting as they write. One writer who testified to his own sense of the rela- tion of grammatical structures to style was Winston Churchill. He realized, he said, that "good sense is the foundation of good writing," but he valuea also the detailed knowledge of sentence components instilled during his school days: "Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing." That is really what Grammar as Style is about—the "essential struc- ture" of the sentence, in all its variety, and the relation of this structure to the craftsmanship, to the artistry, to the style, of the writer. Some years ago Edward Sapir commented on the relation of a language's basic structure to the artist's individuality of expression: The major characteristics of style, in so far as style is a technical matter of the building and placing of words, are given by the lan- guage itself, quite as inescapably, indeed, as the general acoustic effect of verse is given by the sounds and natural accents of the language. These necessary fundamentals of style are hardly felt by the artist to constrain his individuality of expression. They rather point the way to those stylistic developments that most suit the natural bent of the language. It is not in the least likely that a truly great style can seriously oppose itself to the basic form patterns of the language. It not only incorporates them, it builds on them. Grammar as Style, then, is an effort to examine some of what Sapir calls "the basic form patterns" of English and to see how expert writers build on them. We know there is no magic key to good writing, and no magic key to the study of style. Style, of course, is not any one thing. It is the simultaneous working of many features of language, and the role of any single feature varies with its context. We recognize this, but we want to begin somewhere. The study of structural patterns, along with an attempt to isolate some of their effects in the hands of contemporary writers, is one way to begin. In several chapters I have mentioned Professor Francis Christensen, formerly my colleague at the University of Southern California, and have called attention to aspects of his work that have influenced the present study. As these pages go to press, I am saddened by his death. Francis Christensen was a modest and gentle man, a brilliant and painstaking scholar whose contributions to modern thought on rhetoric are original, significant, and practical. He did more than anyone else of his time, I think, to help teachers do a better job of teaching writing. I am grateful to all the writers whose works are quoted in Grammar as Style. The name of each author and work accompanies the quotation in the text and also is listed alphabetically by author, with publisher and edition, in a bibliography-index at the back of the book. I thank Marianne Boretz, a candidate for the Ph.D. in English at USC, for her diligence and good humor in the long task of preparing and checking the bibliography. Although he has not read this book, I want to mention in particular Professor L. M. Myers of Arizona State University (quoted in Chapter 8), whose work in language and literature has long influenced my thoughts on these subjects. I am indebted also to Professor Richard S. Beal of Boston University for reading this book in its early stages and offering suggestions that improved it. For several years, during summers and midsemester breaks, it was my good fortune to have the assistance of Garrett Stewart, a graduate of USC, now writing his doctoral dissertation in English at Yale. His name appears on the title page, and I want to record here as well that he contributed substantially to every chapter and collaborated on the last chapter, "Syntactic Symbolism: Grammar as Analogue" and on the com- panion volume, Exercises in Creativity. Wyatt James, with extraordinary skill and care, saw Grammar as Style through the press. Two research grants from the Research and Publication Fund of the University of Southern California were helpful when I first began work on this subject. Los Angeles, California V.T.