Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style
In Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte presents — and comments on — more than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sentences come from an extensive search to identify some of the ways professional writers use the generous resources of the English language.
The book displays the sentences in fourteen chapters, each one organized around a syntactic concept-short sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, appositives, parallelism, for example. It thus provides a systematic, comprehensive range of models for aspiring writers.
Artful Sentences grows out of one of Virginia Tufte’s earlier books, Grammar as Style. Fresh examples from fiction and nonfiction bring new insights into the ways syntactic patterns work. Because the examples are such a pleasure, readers may be tempted to skip everything else, but the comments are inviting also, calling attention to techniques that are useful to writers of almost any type of fiction or nonfiction.
Both new and experienced writers will find inspiration: the book is not about “errors” but about successes. If you are already a good writer, Artful Sentences can help you to become excellent.
To write is to bring structure to ideas, information, feelings. Here are many creative strategies, in a unique book that is informed, affirming, lively, and of lasting value.
Virginia Tufte is distinguished emerita professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her special fields are Milton, Renaissance poetry, and the history and grammar of English.
Reviews
- "The precision of Virginia Tufte's analysis of syntactical effects is breathtaking, and all the more so because it never seems labored. Her own prose is a model of efficiency, and is at the same time as elegant as the examples she provides. A delight from beginning to end." STANLEY FISH
- "Whereas most books about grammar, syntax, style, are about errors. this one is about sentences and syntactical strategies that work, and the book is laced with more than a thousand sentences quoted from first-rate modern and contemporary writers. Indispensable for writers. Beautifully printed." DAVID JAUSS
- "Virginia Tufte's Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style is as unique as it is superb. Neither a composition handbook nor a history of rhetoric nor an exposition of other critics' syntactic theories. Tufte's book lays out the author's own very special understanding of how sentences work and what they can do. Tufte's knowledge of literature is so far-reaching that her examples are always apposite and surprising. And her recognition that syntax is itself symbolic makes this a pivotal book for all who write. Most important: Artful Sentences is a real pleasure to read: one marvels at the examples from such diverse sources-examples that really show us what different devices can do. I plan to keep Tuhe's book on my desk for ready reference-and sheer enjoyment." MARJORIE PERLOFF
- "This extraordinary work of wit and scholarship gives us a tremendous gift: it allows us co see 'through' any narrative we read from now on, past any 'meaning' to the bones of the structure. Those bones shine." CAROLYN SEE
