Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose
Constance Hale
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0385346891
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A fully revised and updated edition with challenges and writing prompts in every chapter
Today’s writers need more spunk than Strunk: whether it's the Great American e-mail, Madison Avenue advertising, or Grammy Award-winning rap lyrics, memorable writing must jump off the page. Copy veteran Constance Hale is on a mission to make creative communication, both the lyrical and the unlawful, an option for everyone.
With its crisp, witty tone, Sin and Syntax covers grammar’s ground rules while revealing countless unconventional syntax secrets (such as how to use—Gasp!—interjections or when to pepper your prose with slang) that make for sinfully good writing. Discover how to:
*Distinguish between words that are “pearls” and words that are “potatoes”
* Avoid “couch potato thinking” and “commitment phobia” when choosing verbs
* Use literary devices such as onomatopoeia, alliteration, and metaphor (and understand what you're doing)
Everyone needs to know how to write stylish prose—students, professionals, and seasoned writers alike. Whether you’re writing to sell, shock, or just sing, Sin and Syntax is the guide you need to improve your command of the English language.
words that lead to waterlogged phrases include case, character, degree, element, instance, kind, nature, and persuasion. These will lead you to roundabout prepositional phrases instead of straight nouns and verbs: • “His complaints are of a very far-reaching character.” (His complaints ranged from leaky faucets to noises in his head.) • “Voters showed a greater degree of interest in the electoral process this year.” (Citizens voted in droves.) • “The wages will be low owing to the
theoretical fallacy. Did you catch the subject-verb disagreement there? (Problems … arises?) Even Voegelin lost track of his point! And here’s the Russian poet and Dante scholar Osip Mandelstam, quoted in The Guardian, writing about The Divine Comedy: … in its most densely foliated aspect is oriented toward authority, it is most densely rustling, most concertante just when it is caressed by dogma, by canon, by the firm chrysostomatic word. But the whole trouble is that in authority—or, to put
more than Alexander Haig. “I’ll have to caveat any response, Senator, and I’ll caveat that,” Haig said to one politician. To another, Haig replied: “Not the way you contexted it, Senator.” Caveat and context are flat-footed ideas, not fleet-footed actions. When secretary of state nominee Haig appeared at Senate confirmation hearings, a British newspaper heralded the attendant linguistic developments: “verbs were nouned, nouns verbed, adjectives adverbised,” and the secretary-designate “techniqued
remembered the look of that apartment, how it was arranged, and the wall paper, and instead we had taken the upstairs of the pavilion in Notre Dame des Champs in the courtyard with the sawmill (and the sudden whine of the saw, the smell of sawdust and the chestnut tree over the roof with a mad woman downstairs), and the year worrying about money (all of the stories back in the post that came in through a slit in the saw-mill door, with notes of rejection that would never call them stories, but
Malachy. Now the twins started to cry and Malachy clung to Mam, sobbing. The cows mooed, the sheep maaed, the goats ehehed, the birds twittered in the trees, and the beep beep of a motor car cut through everything. WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? To the Lighthouse is often cited for Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing and her startling metaphors. But take a look at the sounds of her words: The monotonous fall of waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and