An Art of Choice: Style and Sentences (Part 2)
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884, Oil on Canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
By Dr. Melvin Hall,
Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric
from the University of Wisconsin — Madison.
❞ So the first step is for the student to understand what it is that he is going to imitate, and to know why it is good.
How Do We Look at Style?
A hierarchy of forms, as we learned in Part 1, creates style: grammar (lower-level forms) and sentence arrangement (higher-level forms). Sentence arrangement imposes constraints (or boundary conditions) on grammar’s forms to create style. To analyze style, then, we must learn to toggle between style’s lower and higher orders.
Seurat’s painting La Grande Jatte provides a good illustration. In Image 1, we are looking at the grammar of Seurat’s style, the tiny brush strokes, iotas of color. These brush strokes follow the same form and order – like grammar rules. When we view the painting at a distance (this blog’s visual epigraph), we are looking from (through, beyond, or away from) the brush strokes to a higher-level form – the painting’s meaning conveyed by its style. Seurat’s grand arrangement of brush strokes, at a distance, synthesizes pixelated colors into consolidated images in a scene. Seurat’s arrangement of forms and color into preconceived images and forms imposes conditions (higher-level forms) on his brush strokes and primary colors (lower-level forms), thus creating his pointillist style.
In Part 1, using a color-code, we identified the types of sentences that Thomas uses in his essay (Image 2). Now, we will use that data to analyze Lewis Thomas’ style. We will alternate between looking at the grammatical types of sentences (a writer’s brush strokes of thought) and through the grammar to Thomas’ arrangement of those sentences to create his counterpoint style.
Before we begin our analysis, it is important to put Thomas’ writing style in context. Thomas was a biologist and medical doctor. He served as dean of Yale Medical School and the President of the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, so he could certainly write standardized scientific articles – the kind we will analyze in Part 3. However, in 1971, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine noticed Thomas’ exemplary writing style, and he asked Thomas to write a monthly essay for the journal. Thomas agreed on one condition – he be given complete authorial control; the editor of NEJM could not interfere with his writing style. The editor agreed. Thomas could write about any topic without editorial constraint. The only stipulation was that Thomas should try to limit his essay to fit the journal’s column (Angyal 47).
I chose Thomas because he is a scientist and because many authoritative writers, critics, and scientists (Joyce Carol Oats and John Updike, for example) consider his writing to be exemplary – the primus inter pares of models to be imitated. So Thomas’s essay, “Social Talk,” is one model of good writing style.
I chose his essay, too, for methodological reasons. It provides us with a foil for contrasting in Part 3, Cooks and Holden’s writing style published in the journal Science. The essay genre allows Thomas freedom to develop a unique style. Cooks and Holden express their creativity in the genre of the scientific article by showing how well they imitate the scientific community’s preferred writing style – much different than Thomas’ style.
Here, in Part 2, we will learn why Thomas has an organic, baroque counterpoint style that is uniquely his own.
What Are the Attributes of Thomas’ Counterpoint Style?
Grammar (Words, Phrases, Clauses, and Sentences) Lower-Level Forms
First, we will look at Thomas’ grammar – his use of phrases, clauses, and types of sentences. These structures can’t be altered; they must follow the grammatical principles of word order dictated by the principles (laws) of lower-level forms.
Words and Phrases: Thomas, many times throughout his essay, repeats verbal, prepositional, and noun phrases. He also repeats parts of speech. Sample 1 below provides examples of Thomas’ use of grammatical words and phrases.
Clauses: Sample 2 below illustrates Thomas’ use of clauses to form catenated parallel structures at the sentence level. Thomas often repeats (compounds) independent and dependent clauses to create his style.
Sentence Types: Thomas uses all four types of English sentences. Table 1 provides a summary of Thomas’ use of the four types of sentences. We notice four attributes about his use of grammatical types of sentences:
-
The predominant use of simple sentences; Forty-one percent of Thomas’ sentences are simple.
-
The proportional variety of sentence types: compound (15%), complex (20%), and compound-complex (24%) – nearly a symmetrical distribution.
-
The ratio of simple sentences (41%) to the total compound sentences (Cp + Cp-Cx, 39%) is nearly 1:1, showing a remarkable symmetry and balance.
-
The average sentence length is 25 words. The longest simple sentence (49 words) nearly matches the longest compound-complex sentence (51 words), an indication of Thomas’ use of repeated parallel structures to dilate thought. Nearly a quarter of his sentences are 10 words longer than the average.
This concludes our observations of Thomas use of grammatical, lower-order forms. Because these lower-level forms are, for the most part, unalterable, we have, other than frequency of use, little to comment on. It is the next level in the hierarchy of forms where we observe the genesis of style.
Style, Arrangement (Higher-Level Forms)
Thomas’ arrangement and order of the grammatical forms imposes boundary conditions on those lower-order forms to produce his style.
The first and most obvious boundary condition we notice is Thomas’ choice to use a balanced variety of sentence types. He uses a large number of compound sentences. Thirty-nine percent of his sentences are compound or compound-complex. Even so, Thomas chooses to use simple sentences more often than any other sentence type. Forty-one percent of his sentences are simple sentences.
The second and most prominent boundary condition is Thomas' use of what I name catenated parallel structures. This means Thomas links parallel structures in long series. This catenated structure recurs at different levels of the text’s hierarchy: word, phrase, clause, sentence, and paragraph levels. It has been remarked (even by Thomas himself) that his essays imitate a Bach fugue. If we think of this catenated parallel structure as a melody, we see (or hear) it first in clauses, then in words, then in sentences, and, again, in phrases. The parallel structure (the theme) passes from one language pattern to another like a fugue’s melody passing from voice to voice. Let’s see how it works.
Paragraph 1, Sentence 3 (Sample 3, Example 1) is the first use of a catenated parallel structure. It is a compound sentence joining three successive independent clauses. We see, too, that the independent clauses are joined with semicolons (not coordinating conjunctions, asyndeton).
Immediately after Sentence 3, he repeats, in Sentence 4, a compound sentence (creating a parallel structure at the level of the sentence). The verbal phrases within Sentence 4 take up the theme of catenated parallel structures. (See Sample 4). The visualization of Thomas’ sentence sequence (See Table 2) reveals the first paragraph’s parallel symmetry: two simple sentences, two compound sentences in the center with parallel structures, two simple sentences.
Thomas continues the repetition of parallel structures in the second paragraph. The entire paragraph is a catenation of six compound (five of which are compound-complex) sentences. When we look at the second paragraph’s sentence sequence (Table 2), we visualize the repeated structure – like a fugue’s theme modulating and repeating from sentence to sentence. The seventh sentence is a good example of a sentence (See Sample 3 above) containing the catenation of four independent clauses. Again, we observe Thomas’ use of parallel structures within parallel structures, at the paragraph and sentence levels. In Paragraph 2, in addition to parallel structures, Thomas uses various rhetorical devices: anaphora, parentheses, and antithesis (See blog “Form and Meaning” for an analysis of Paragraph 2). Thomas style is an icon, an image of the idea that he is trying to convey to his reader. We can see the living nest or hive of language in his style embodied in the repetition of form. And we can hear the fugue-like form when we read his text aloud.
Throughout the essay, Thomas repeats parallel structures in simple sentences, too. Thomas composes the longest simple sentence (49 words), for example, using five verbal phrases (See Sample 5). We notice, too, the use of adverbs and verbs to create chains of parallel word structures within simple sentences (See Sample 6, words in red font).
In Paragraph 7’s single sentence and fragment, we notice a remarkable rhetorical feature (See Sample 6). There is a pause in the repetition of parallel structures. The entire paragraph is a seven-word sentence and a three-word fragment (prepositional phrase). Thomas imposes the constraints of a higher-order rhetorical form on lower order grammar – he breaks the lower-order rules, so to speak, when he uses a fragment for rhetorical effect. The essay’s main focus is introduced with a short sentence and presented with the fragment: “About human speech.”
The sequence of sentences depicted in Table 2, shows that the essay’s sentence structure carefully builds to the climax in Paragraph 7. From Paragraph 2 to Paragraph 5, 17 of the 21 sentences (all but four) are compound and complex sentences. Then, we reach the essay’s center and focal point: human speech. After this pause (fragment), the repetition of compound sentences and parallel structures (Thomas’ baroque style) resumes until the essay’s end.
Thomas creates his style by imposing two main types of boundary conditions:
(1) He uses a proportional variety of all four sentence types; (2) He repeats forms at all levels of language (word, phrase, clause, and sentence), called catenated parallel structures, to create a baroque counterpoint style in written language. Of course, Thomas uses other rhetorical forms (anaphora, parentheses, and antithesis) which we did not analyze, but these forms are made to serve, too, the repetition and spiraling out of compounded, parallel structures.
Did Thomas Imitate a Model?
Yes, Thomas imitated the essays of Miguel de Montaigne and the counterpoint of Bach. We know that Thomas was influenced by Montaigne’s essays. He read “over an eight-year period” Montaigne’s essays translated by Donald Frame and published in 1965 (Angyal 64).
In addition, we know from Thomas’ himself that he was enamored with J.S. Bach’s music. He often worked late while listening to Bach. He writes about Bach and his counterpoint style throughout his essays. In an essay entitled “Information,” for example, Thomas (1974) writes that the structure of human language gives humans the ability to “evolve from words to Bach” (93). For Thomas, music is a higher-level form that places boundary conditions on language. And by imitating the musical style of Bach’s counterpoint, he derives the fugal style of his essays.
There is a third influence on Thomas’ writing style, easy to overlook because it is so obvious. Thomas was a biologist. Biologists are intensely concerned with life’s morphology. That is, the forms that life takes. Thomas’ keen eye for the details of life’s forms likely gave him his keen eye for the intricate details of written language’s style. His written style also imitates the forms of life he studied.
For us, this is inspiring. As burgeoning writer-scholars, we can look for our models and inspirations of form in the entire world around us – provided we are in the habit of noticing.
What Are the Key Takeaways for Novice Writers?
In Part 2, we trained ourselves to notice style by toggling between lower-order grammatical forms and higher-order rhetorical forms. By attending to these orders of form, we were able to dwell in Thomas style and absorb it into our own repertoire. It is only by this careful study and practice that we can develop our own effortless styles.
We can highlight five key takeaways regarding style:
-
Thomas extensively uses parallel structures in series to dilate thought and compound ideas; this stylistic device is especially useful for writing simple sentences and enumerating ideas in concise forms.
-
Thomas predominantly uses simple sentences – even in his baroque style. Professional writers often use more simple sentences than any other of the four types of English sentences.
-
Thomas’ simple sentences range from seven to forty-nine words; simple sentence does not necessarily mean “short.”
-
Thomas balances his use of all four types of sentences (simple, compound, complex and compound-complex).
-
Thomas’ style is a good model for how to write different varieties of compound and complex sentences.
So writers, to develop their own style, can study Thomas’ model for the way he uses simple sentences, parallel structures, sentence variety, and compound structures. Writers can focus on a single sentence or single paragraph. There is no need to study the entire essay at once. Each sentence or paragraph is its own lesson in style. Now, in Part 3, we will turn our attention to studying the style used in a standard scientific article.
Table 1 and Table 2
References
Angyal, A. J. (1989). Lewis Thomas. Twayne Publishers.
Thomas, L. (1972, November 9). Social talk. New England Journal of Medicine, 287(19).
Thomas, L. (1974). Social talk. In The lives of a cell: Notes of a biology watcher (pp. 84 – 88). Penguin.
Thomas, L. (1972, December 14). Information. New England Journal of Medicine, 287(24).
Thomas, L. (1974). Information. In The lives of a cell: Notes of a biology watcher (pp. 89 – 93). Penguin.