WORDS ON THE LINE by Philip Vassallo: June 2019

Friday, June 28, 2019

Splendid Sentences, Part 21: William L. Shirer on Hitler's Final Hours

Toward the end of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, William L. Shirer writes that unto death Hitler learned nothing of Nazi failures, as proven in the Fuehrer's two final documents, his last will and his political testament:

Indeed, in the last hours of his life he reverted to the young man he had been in the gutter days in Vienna and in the early rowdy beer hall period in Munich, cursing the Jews for all the ills of the world, spinning his half-baked theories about the universe, and whining that fate once more had cheated Germany of victory and conquest.

At 62 words, that's a lot of sentence. Here Shirer summarizes both his 1,245-page book about Hitler's 12 years in power and the dictator's sociopathic (cursing the Jews), distorted (spinning half-baked theories), paranoid (whining that fate) worldview. Shirer chooses reverted to signal Hitler's failure to evolve as a rational, moral human being, returning the 56-year-old man to his irresponsible youthful days. The writer also drops the comma after life to move matters along, and he inserts the serial (or Oxford) comma after universe to help the reader manage three long phrases of 10, 10, and 12 words.

Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:

Friday, June 21, 2019

Splendid Sentences, Part 20: Ernest Hemingway on Being Hungry in Paris

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food.

So starts Ernest Hemingway's essay "Hunger was Good Discipline" in A Moveable Feast (1964), a memoir about his Paris years, published three years after his death. This 41-word sentence is striking for several reasons:

The use of you. This thrice-used rhetorical device would get under an English teacher's skin, but Hemingway brings his readers into the experience, regardless of whether they have visited Paris.
The verb got. The vernacular might irritate a stylist looking for elegance of expression, but it is plain, understandable language.
The adverbs very and such. Most writing instructors say that adverbs are often usually useless. True, these words do not add much value to the description, but they complement the colloquial style.
Nondescript words like good and things. Why not at least delicious instead of good to describe the food in the window? What about croissants or macaroons or crusty bread to replace things? Because Hemingway trusts us to imagine what we will.
No commas. A grammar snob would call for at least one comma after windows, and arguably another one after Paris. But Hemingway wants to move us along a bit quicker to the next sentence.
Redundancies. Bakeries could cover for bakery shops, and on the sidewalk eliminates the need for outside. Here Hemingway wants a rhythm to the sentence that is better served by the verbiage.
Plain sense words. We saw and smelled the food. We do not need much more for our eyes to be riveted on the bakery window as the open door releases an irresistible aroma of freshly baked bread. We've been there, done that; we had the multi-sensory experience without the author needing to say more than he did.

This sentence reminds us that we are all capable of writing if we capture interesting human reactions to the world we encounter.

Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:

Friday, June 14, 2019

Splendid Sentences, Part 19: Robert Penn Warren on Reading Fiction

Robert Penn Warren concludes the second paragraph of his essay "Why Do We Read Fiction?" (Saturday Evening Post, October 20, 1962) with this non-sentence:

To put it bluntly: no conflict, no story.

Why would a renowned writer and educator write a sentence fragment and break two other standard English grammar rules, flawed though they are (beginning a sentence with a verb and using a colon after a phrase)? I can think of at least three reasons.

First, as Robert Penn Warren, he can get away with it. A poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist, he can take literary license to drive home a point or surprise the reader by altering grammatical conventions.

Second, the fragment follows the previous sentence nicely:

And the experience that is characteristically presented in a story is that of facing a problem, a conflict.

Notice, again, Warren's contempt for four other standards: (1) don't begin a sentence with and: (2) avoid passive voice, as in is presented; (3) avoid awkward constructions, such as is that of; and (4) don't drop clarifying words, such as in which is before a conflict.

Third, Warren trusts that his readers want as much plain speak as they can get in a deeply theoretical article. And what are fragments but plain speech? Got it?

Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:

Friday, June 07, 2019

Splendid Sentences, Part 18: John Dewey on International Cooperation

In Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey's Philosophy, American educational philosopher John Dewey writes this interesting 33-word sentence:

No intelligent person, apart from party politics or the exigencies of consistency with some position taken in the past, favors isolation for its own sake, or is cold to the idea of cooperation.

What makes this sentence so interesting is not merely that Dewey separates his subject (person) from the first part of his predicate (favors) by 16 words, causing some suspense. More remarkably, he gives two excuses for favoring isolation for its own sake and for being cold to the idea of cooperation—excuses that contradict his premise and nearly obliterate his position. After all, aren't isolation and cooperation the provinces of party politics and political positions?

Those 16 contrasting words concede a point, which is a hallmark of persuasion. They also accurately depict the actions of elected officials. Yet Dewey is not interested so much in diplomacy as he is in his readers using their intellect and conscience in his argument that follows.

Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:

WORDS ON THE LINE by Philip Vassallo