Introduction

Driven by some combustible mix of passion (for the power of words) and desperation (so many snags in your sentences!), you’ve picked up a book called Sin and Syntax. What, you’re wondering, does syntax (that collection of prissy rules telling us how to put words together) have to do with sin (the reckless urge to flout propriety)?

Sin and Syntax plays with dynamic tensions in language: The underlying codes that give prose its clarities yet fail to explain its beauties. The sludge that muddles writing. The delight in the wacky. Sin and Syntax is about the skill that allows you, the writer, to harness such complexities, to create prose that thrills.

Are you ready to turn syntax from a minefield into a stamping ground—your stamping ground? Forget schoolmarmish rules. Forget grammar as it was drilled in grade school. Rest assured, you’ll get your grammar here, on the theory that it’s best to know the rules before you break them. This book will indeed show you how to avoid red-pen comments, but, more important, it’ll show you how to make some sinful mischief.

IF ALL THIS SEEMS paradoxical, get used to it. Language is paradox.

Sin and Syntax dwells in contradictions. It dabbles in the eloquence of tradition, the intelligence of creoles, the decadence of slang. We’ll root around where language is most playful: in the pop, the vernacular, the mongrel tongues. We’ll examine how the highbrow and the lowbrow define the edges of prose and how the middlebrow dooms it to mediocrity. We’ll diss legalese and computerese and ditch the lifeless rhythms of Standard Written English.

We’ll also summon the spirit of renegades who ignore taboos and make the language sing, from Shakespeare to Shake ’n Bake and from Joan Didion to Junot Díaz. With a little Bob Dylan and Nicki Minaj thrown in. We’ll wallow with Walt Whitman, who ridiculed the dictionary makers, insisting that language has its base broad and low, close to the ground. We’ll accept English as a robust, swarthy tongue, capable of surviving tumult and thriving on change.

T. S. Eliot once argued that a language with identical spoken and written forms would be practically intolerable, since no one would listen to the first or read the second. Eliot was cool, but let’s not be seduced by false dichotomies. Insisting on strict or stuffy words in writing means you may miss the shifting brilliances of the colloquial. On the other hand, glorifying the spoken, demanding that people write as they speak, can put a higher premium on the pedestrian than on grace, style, and richness. A passion for new terms and easy abbreviation makes for readable emails, but discretion, sensitivity, and metaphor still matter.

In figuring out how to write better, let’s look to the ways the spoken and the written cross-pollinate. Let’s look to texts like the Book of Common Prayer, which was written to be read out loud, and to orators like Winston Churchill, who wrote and rewrote and practiced and repracticed before he ever addressed a public. Let’s look to the voices of cyberspace and to the rhythms of rap, celebrating the syntax and sounds that make narratives come alive.

Books on prose style, of course, are as old as sin—or at least as old as Aristotle, who launched the industry with Poetics and Rhetoric. You’ll see the names of Aristotle’s descendants mentioned throughout the book: Henry Fowler, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, George Orwell, Sir Ernest Gowers. These men have refined the rules of style and usage over the centuries, their efforts culminating in the terse commandments of William Strunk and E. B. White (Use the active voice. Omit needless words. Avoid foreign languages). We’ll hear from more recent gods and goddesses of grammar, too, like Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Patricia O’Conner, Ben Yagoda, and Mignon Fogarty.

But this book is really more about great writing than good grammar. We pay homage to that guru of prose style, William Zinsser, who distilled the wisdom of the ancients into what he called, in his classic On Writing Well, four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity, and humanity.

Sin and Syntax accepts the high bar set by Zinsser—then reimagines both the parts of speech and the parts of the sentence so that you can clear that bar. Sin and Syntax holds that the flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar, and that sinfully good writing depends on understanding both the arcana of syntax and the art of musical sentences.

But adding a little illicit activity to such articles of faith, Sin and Syntax offers five new principles of prose:

        Relish every word.

        Aim deep, but be simple.

        Take risks.

        Seek beauty.

        Find the right pitch.

Moving from the basic to the sophisticated, Sin and Syntax covers the parts of speech and how to exploit them (in Words), shows the parts of a sentence and how to arrange them (in Sentences), and reveals how melody, rhythm, lyricism, and voice give prose its mystery (in Music).

Within these three parts, each of the book’s chapters is broken into five sections:

    •  Bones is the grammar sermonette, giving you simple keys rather than rigid rules. Learn the sensible system, if only to know how to escape it in flights of creative fancy (it’s more flexible than English teachers would have you believe).

    •  Flesh contains the lesson on writing. Linking grammar to prose, it shows how the parts of speech, the elements of sentences, and the techniques of music give us our most riveting stories.

    •  Cardinal Sins catalogs true transgressions: errors made in ignorance. This section will set you straight, exposing the disaster that lurks in mangled syntax. Cardinal Sins also debunks myths and shibboleths that often substitute for a real understanding of the underpinnings of language. (Don’t use the passive voice. Don’t start a sentence with a conjunction. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition.)

    •  Carnal Pleasures shows how, sometimes, writing works because it hews to the underlying codes of language. And how, sometimes, writing works because it defies the codes—or seems to. Carnal Pleasures contains playful, riotous, and sometimes exquisite pieces of writing. It shows how breaking the rules can lead to breakthrough prose.

    •  Catechism puts the lessons into practice. It is the instructional piece at the end of the week, or, in this case, of the chapter. Some simple exercises will test your understanding of grammatical or stylistic ideas, and writing prompts will encourage you to stretch new muscles. Keys to the answers, when relevant, are given by chapter in the Appendix.

Sin and Syntax is designed so that a novice can march from chapter to chapter in orderly fashion, learning how to sync the parts one at a time. But it is also designed so that a prose veteran can head directly to troublesome areas for a refresher course in grammar and a reliable list of do’s and don’ts.

Straightening out grammar and syntax is of course not the be-all and end-all of writing. But a writer needs a command of language as much as a commanding idea. When style complements substance, when technique is put into the service of a good tale, prose can pulse with life.

PART I

Words

The French mime Étienne Decroux used to remind his students, One pearl is better than a whole necklace of potatoes. What is true for that wordless art form applies equally to writing: well-crafted prose depends on the writer’s ability to distinguish between pearls and potatoes. Only some words are fit to be strung into a given sentence.

Great writers are meticulous with their pearls, sifting through piles of them and stringing only perfect specimens upon the thread of syntax. The careful execution of beautiful, powerful prose through beautiful, powerful words is guided by my five principles.

RELISH EVERY WORD

True prose stylists carry on an impassioned lifelong love affair with words, banishing mediocre ones like so many uninteresting suitors, burnishing the good ones till they shimmer. Be infatuated, be seduced, be obsessed.

But be smart about words, too. All words are pegs to hang ideas on, wrote the nineteenth-century essayist Henry Ward Beecher: words not linked to ideas are not worthy of writing—or reading. Once you’ve committed your words to paper (or to the screen), test each term. Does it carry your idea? Does it express, exactly, that once inchoate thought?

Sensitize yourself to denotation and connotation. Denotation, the dictionary definition of a word, refers to its explicit or literal meanings. Connotation, the suggestive power of a word, refers to its implicit or latent meanings. The denotations of peach (a single-seeded fruit with tangy yellowish pulp and downy skin that goes from yellow to red) and mango (a single-seeded fruit with a tangy yellowish pulp and firm skin mottled with greens, yellows, and reds) differ only slightly. But whereas peach summons hot summers in Georgia and the cheeks of a Southern belle, mango conjures images of India and Mexico and the paintings of Gauguin. Wouldn’t it be a mistake to swap in mango when writing about, say, the dusty-peach chambres of a grande dame with a thing for Louis XVI?

Beyond the sense of a word is its sensuousness: its sound, its cadence, its spirit. The sounds of peach and mango differ, letting you play in different ways with surrounding words. In turning a phrase, we want the words to build like a jazz riff, with the melodies of one word playing off the melodies of the others.

AIM DEEP, BUT BE SIMPLE

People used to call me a good writer, mused John Ruskin, a giant of the nineteenth-century essay. Now they say I can’t write at all; because, for instance, if I think anybody’s house is on fire, I only say, ‘Sir, your house is on fire.’ … I used to say, ‘Sir, the abode in which you probably passed the delightful days of youth is in a state of inflammation.’ 

Verbose is not a synonym for literary. Let’s not forsake short, common words that name big things—hope and pride, for example—or simple couplings that leave strong impressions, like William Carlos Williams’s red wheel barrow or Prince’s little red Corvette.

It’s not enough, though, just to be simple. Nine pounds where three are sufficient is obesity, said Frank Lloyd Wright. But to eliminate expressive words in speaking or writing—words that intensify or vivify meaning—is not simplicity. It may be, or usually is, stupidity.

Studying manuscript changes is one of the best ways to get a sense of how great writers arrive at words that intensify or vivify meaning. John Updike’s manuscripts are housed in Houghton Library, Harvard University’s manuscript repository. Updike was known for writing fluently and revising little, but the archive reveals the care he took to excise unnecessary words and to recast necessary ones, and, in doing so, to craft the tone of his sentences.

The New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus called Updike’s sentences lathe-turned. Take, for example, the opening scene of Updike’s Rabbit at Rest. In a first, handwritten stab, Updike begins the novel with this sentence, scrawled across the page:

The Southwest Florida Regional Airport is relatively new and you drive to it off Exit 21 of Federal 75.

The next draft, typed, opens anew, as the author resequences the initial paragraphs to create a less linear, more interior effect:

Standing amid the tan loud, post-Christmas crowd at the Southwestern Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what’s floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and wife and children but something more ominous and intimately his, his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. The sensation chills and oppresses him, above and beyond the air-conditioning. But then he has been feeling uneasy with Nelson for thirty years.

The airport is relatively new; you drive to it off Exit 21 of Federal 75 down three miles of divided highway that for all the skinny palms and groomed green at its sides seems to lead nowhere.

Then Updike continues to refine, discarding the adjective tan and changing vaguely and with. The most interesting change, though, is in the sentence The sensation chills and oppresses him, above and beyond the air-conditioning. Updike removes the second verb and adds terminal before air-conditioning—making a pun that underscores his theme of impending death and sharpening the image: The sensation chills him, above and beyond the terminal air-conditioning.

Updike continued to craft, to tweak, to fret over words. The opening, with tan restored and loud replaced, appears in the published book this way:

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwestern Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what’s floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. The sensation chills him, above and beyond the terminal air-conditioning. But then facing Nelson has made him feel uneasy for thirty years.

The airport is relatively new. You drive to it off Exit 21 off Interstate 75 down three miles of divided highway that for all the skinny palms in rows and groomed too-green flat-bladed grass at its sides seems to lead nowhere.

As Updike shows, even the smallest words (loud or excited? Bermuda grass or flat-bladed grass?) matter. Updike kept refining in every draft. He relished every word.

TAKE RISKS

After having suffered the hyperactive red pens of schoolmarms and the hypercorrect rules of inflexible pedagogues, too many of us have retreated to the realm of the safe, the standard, the unimaginative. We stick to common words—or, worse, pull out a hackneyed phrase. We yield to the conventions of a profession rather than pushing ourselves to be unconventional. We use jargon rather than coming up with original language.

Hidden in such prefab prose is a fear of going to the edge. But it’s romping on the fringes of language that gives writing its frisson. The right word might be snagged off the street, snatched from another language, or hatched in the sand tray of the imagination. Dive into the polyglot English tongue, taking a cue from Walt Whitman, that high priest of the rambunctious:

I like limber, lasting, fierce words. I like them applied to myself—and I like them in newspapers, courts, debates, Congress. Do you suppose the liberties and the brawn of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? with gloved gentleman words? Bad presidents, bad judges, bad clients, bad editors, owners of slaves, and the long ranks of Northern political suckers (robbers, traitors, suborned), monopolists, infidels … shaved persons, supplejacks, ecclesiastics, men not fond of women, women not fond of men, cry down the use of strong, cutting, beautiful rude words. [But] to the manly instincts of the People they will be forever welcome.

Whitman’s American English scarfs up words from other languages with gusto. If someone’s bugging you, you can go the Anglo-Saxon route and shun her; or you can avoid her (Latin); or you can eschew her (French). Or you can tell her to get outta your face. Don’t shun slang, especially when it’s vivid and musical and fills a gap in the lexicon.

A word not in the dictionary is not out of bounds. H. L. Mencken carried on about coinages bubbling up out of the American experience; one of his favorites, rubberneck, he called almost a complete treatise on American psychology. That simple word, he wrote, conveyed a characteristically American boldness and contempt: the grotesque humor of the country, the delight in devastating opprobriums, and the acute feeling for the succinct and savory.

More modern neologists have kept up the mischief, giving us gems like snarky, snail mail, chump change, game changer, de-ice, de-friend, sexting, supersize, rollerblade, blog, and, my favorite, babelicious.

SEEK BEAUTY

Brevity isn’t everything. Winston Churchill, who generally endorsed short and simple words, chose flocculent over woolly in describing the mental process of certain people in his treatise The Second World War. Why? Flocculent carries an edge of contempt, echoing words like flop, flap, flaccid, flimsy, flabby, and flatulent. Churchill knew that sounds can make words sing.

It’s not just sound that gives a word beauty. It’s also precision. In our media-driven age, when the succinct sound bite and the skeletal headline push us to ever more elliptical expression, we need to make space for meaning. The constrictive columns on the newspaper’s front page make probe a popular synonym for investigation, inquiry, or hearing, but check out the unintended ambiguity of this regrettable headline: City’s Housing Chief Probed. (Did he say Ouch?)

Some editors dumb down copy for mass audiences, preferring the short word to the long. I once filed a story on a California town celebrating its determination to come back after an earthquake by holding a party at 5:04 P.M., exactly a year after the Loma Prieta temblor. If earthquakes give you the willies, I wrote in my lead, Gilroy has come up with a palliative you’re going to love. The city editor changed palliative to cure, arguing that "no one knows the meaning of palliative." But there is no cure for earthquake anxiety. Palliative really was the right word, even if cure was shorter, simpler, and more common.

FOR INSPIRATION, GO ON literary adventures with novelists like Djuna Barnes, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, or Toni Morrison—none of whom uses lowest-common-denominator diction. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! delivers monologues like this one, by Mississippi spinster Rosa Coldfield. The sixty-five-year-old widowed virgin reflects bitterly on her adolescent flowering, which was driven underground when, at fourteen, she fell in love only to be jilted. Faulkner’s rich words have all the pungency of emotions that have been on low simmer for half a century:

Once there was (they cannot have told you this) a summer of wistaria. It was a pervading everywhere of wistaria (I was fourteen then) as though of all springs yet to capitulate condensed into one spring, one summer: the spring and summertime which is every female’s who breathed above dust, beholden of all betrayed springs held over from all irrevocable time, repercussed, bloomed again. It was a vintage year of wistaria: vintage year being that sweet conjunction of root bloom and urge and hour and weather; and I (I was fourteen)—I will not insist on bloom, at whom no man had yet to look—nor would ever—twice.… But root and urge I do insist and claim, for had I not heired too from all the unsistered Eves since the Snake? Yes, urge I do: warped chrysalis of what blind perfect seed: for who shall say what gnarled forgotten root might not bloom yet with some globed concentrate more globed and concentrate and heady-perfect because the neglected root was planted warped and lay not dead but merely slept forgot?

Language doesn’t have to be Faulknerian to be luscious. In Sula, Toni Morrison also focuses on a summer of root bloom and urge and hour and weather. But in her case, the adolescents Sula and Nel live in Medallion, Ohio:

Then summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences; iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down to their stalks. And the boys. The beautiful, beautiful boys who dotted the landscape like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened the river with their shining wet backs. Even their footsteps left a smell of smoke behind.

It was in that summer, the summer of their twelfth year, the summer of the beautiful black boys, that they became skittish, frightened and bold—all at the same time.

Morrison’s paragraph starts with tight sentences and breaks open like the blossoms they describe. Her participles pour out. The words themselves glisten.

FIND THE RIGHT PITCH

Prose is an intimate exchange between writer and reader. Always think about your reader; hold your audience in your mind. Don’t talk to readers as if they are strangers, or as if they are beneath you.

In music, pitch has to do with the position of a sound within the complete range of sound. But even in music, pitch is not cut and dried—sound registers in the mind of the listener. In writing, pitch might be thought of as tilt, slant, cant, spiel, delivery, or act of persuasion—it has to do with how a writer combines meaning, melody, and tone to touch a reader.

The best children’s book authors are masters of pitch, because they need to write lines that appeal simultaneously to those equally fearsome critics—children and their easily bored parents. If children are lulled to sleep by the soft lines and easy rhymes of Goodnight Moon (Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere), adults ride the swells of sound and never tire of the story, no matter how many times they read it. If children love the topsy-turvy sentences of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham (I am Sam. Sam I am), adults appreciate the subversive humor (I will eat them in the rain. And in the dark. And on a train).

Years ago, when I was tutoring children in order to support my writing habit, I had occasion to discuss the progress of a seven-year-old student with her father, a man of many academic degrees. I’ll never forget his mentioning a colloquy he had had with Annie the night before. It struck me as an example of imperfect pitch, because the word was so out of keeping with the child we were talking about and our work together. Pompous phrasing often serves no purpose other than to puff up the speaker.

Academic treatises often contain such tone-deaf writing. When we learn to write English papers in high school we are often rewarded for big words. Unfortunately, these habits only get worse in Ph.D. programs, which seem to breed abstract language like cultures in a Petri dish. The best academic writers impress us not just with their scholarship, but with their ability to find the right pitch—think of the English professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for example, the scientist Jared Diamond, the media studies professor Camille Paglia, the linguist Noam Chomsky, and the historians Jill Lepore and Annette Gordon-Reed.

Pretentious diction, of course, is rife in many professions besides academia. Take the legal field. No attorney goes home and says at the dinner table, Please pass the green beans. Said green beans are excellent. So why does she write contracts and letters that sound so unnatural? The best attorneys know how to talk to the jury. Celebrated legal writers like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Clarence Darrow, Barbara Jordan, and Antonin Scalia know to adjust pitch to a wide audience.

Jargon—the technical words and code phrases that professionals use to talk to one another in shorthand—can keep a layperson in the dark. When one computer programmer tells another to type ‘hash bang slash user slash local slash bin slash perl’  (i.e., !/​usr/​local/​bin/​perl), that coders’ jargon serves a purpose, helping two people work together efficiently. But when marketing mavens promote hardware and software to the public, their words are softer than software: implementation, functionality, interoperability, and even ease of use are just a bunch of junk words. Jargon can reflect institutions more than it does the real humans they serve. Even if it gets to the mercenary point, monetizing is no better than finding a way to make money. If you want to write eloquently as a professional, you need to do it with good words. Universal words.

TO FIND THE RIGHT pitch is to be human, to have a sense of the street, while still reaching for the lofty. It means resisting the kind of language that suits cogs in a machine better than sentient beings. George Orwell, in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, concocted this impenetrable sentence to show what happens when we lose an ear for our own voices:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Orwell’s sentence, with its inflated abstractions, makes a mess of a statement that started out as the epitome of simplicity, clarity, and humanity. The sentence comes from Ecclesiastes, and it shows how well the seventeenth-century scholars who translated the Bible into English understood the notion of pitch:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Every word in that sentence is a pearl, and every word helps set a pitch that is at once humble and eloquent.

CHAPTER 1

Nouns

Bones

What would a grammar book be if it didn’t lounge around in a little Latin? Let’s take the word noun, which derives from nomen, for name. This useful Latin trivia tells us exactly why nouns exist: to name the things in our world. But before we focus on nouns, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane to refresh our understanding about all the parts of speech.

Many of us first learned about the different categories of words in grade school, or—depending on our age—from the TV series Schoolhouse Rock!, which defines the parts of speech with catchy ditties. The song about the noun tells us that it is a special kind of word (It’s any name you ever heard) and that it is quite interesting (a person, place, or thing).

But nouns are even more interesting than that, especially the ones we want to use in writing that skews older than elementary school. It’s true that nouns name people, places, and things-you-can-taste-touch-see-smell-or-hear. But a noun can also name intangible things, like concepts, emotions, or ideas.