To put it another way, propositions are the atoms from which the molecule of the sentence is constructed.



They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea, and every morning you could see Mrs. K eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or clearing the house with handfuls of magnetic dust which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard, and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed, and no one drifted out their doors, you could see Mr. K himself in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle.





Deep in the dark blue air sing these lives that make the summer night. The lightning bug does not sing. But of all these lives, it alone, the lightning bug alone, is visible. The others are heard but not seen, felt but not seen, smelled but not seen.





He punched the door with a code combination, and awaited face check. It came properly, the door dilated, and a voice inside said, "Come in, Felix."



So here I go reading another one of those "How to write" books. Except this one was different, and before I get into the gritty-nitty of it, I'd like to talk about prose. Specifically, prose style. Because that is what Brooks Landon is really talking about when he talks about sentences.Those of us who read a lot, and especially those of us who assay/aspire/pretend to be writers ourselves, probably spend a lot of time thinking about "good writing" and especially what makes writing "good." And when the topic moves specifically to writing style, there are as many opinions as there are readers. But while you'll get people who deny there is any such thing as "good writing" as an objective, measurable quality - there is only writing that one likes, and writing that one doesn't - I call bullshit on that. Certainly no book is loved or hated by everyone. And entertainment value, having an important message, having interesting characters, a thrilling plot, those are all qualities that are fair to factor in when you decide how many stars to give a book on Goodreads. Everyone has their own subjective criteria. Some people love Dan Brown, some people love. If you give5 stars because it made the teenage girl in you squee and melt, okay, fine, whatever.But if you say thatdemonstrates Stephenie Meyer's command of prose, that she builds great sentences and knows her way around the English language and is worthy of being called a great writer, not on the basis that she entertained millions with brain-crack for girls but because she crafts prose with an artisan's skill, well... I will say you are nucking futs and you should not use words because words are too pretty for you.Incidentally, I'd say the same thing if we switch "Stephenie Meyer" to "J.K. Rowling," even though I have a great love for Harry Potter. Rowling is a better writer than Stephenie Meyer by far, but a great writer - by which I mean, a writer who writes great sentences - she is not.My point being, there is a skill to writing great prose. Yes, it's just one aspect of great writing. You can write the beautifulest sentences in the world and not tell a great story, or have wooden characters. But we all agree (even if we don't agree that we agree) that there is such a thing as good sentence-writing, which is to say, good prose. If there isn't, then why do we even bother learning to write better? What is "polishing" if prose quality is purely subjective and the only thing that's really objective is grammatical correctness?Ray Bradbury is not my favorite author, because all of his science fiction is suburban Illinois circa 1950. But read this opening fromNow, think what you like about the rest of the book, or about science fiction, but I don't care if you hate sci-fi or you think Martians and electric spiders are stupid, if you do not see that that is great writing on a sentence level then what can I say to you but stick to simple nouns and simple predicates, you poor blighted proselorn churl.Here's another sentence I selected myself, from, by Donald Harington:Take those sentences apart. Analyze them. What techniques does Harington use? (Does this sound like an English class?) Is it not clear to you that there is skill involved? Maybe the style is not to your taste. Appreciation of different styles is subjective. But recognition of skill is not. There are some specific techniques in the above sentences, and Brooks Landon even gives name to them.Lest you think it's all about high-falutin' rhetorical arts, though, there is also the simplicity of using exactly the right words for the right effect. One of the most famous sentence examples in science fiction is this one from Robert Heinlein'sThere are no particularly sophisticated techniques used in the construction of those sentences. But they are active, things-are-happening sentences that also sneak in crucial bits of world-building and scene-setting with the simple (and, at the time this was written, exotically futuristic) use of words like "face check" and "dilated." People have written essays about Heinlein's genius in describing a "dilating door."I am also tempted here to include the sentence in Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners that goes on for nine pages. Except, y'know, that would make this review go on for nine pages.That's a writing trick you probably should not try at home.So, how do you write with great prose style? Brooks Landon argues, with authority, that you write great sentences. How do you write great sentences? Here we get to an art that is not as subjective as it may seem, and yet it is unique, personal, and can only be demonstrated but not really taught. I will liken it to martial arts, since I practice Japanese jujutsu. There is nothing magical or mystical about proper throws and joint locks and grappling techniques. It all works according to perfectly scientific, physiological principles. And you can learn it, by doing, and each move can be analyzed mechanically, particularly with reference to a good understanding of anatomy. And yet nobody can become a black belt just by studying a book, no matter how comprehensive the illustrations and descriptions. There are certain things that take way too many words to explain, if you can even explain them at all: "Just do this!" you say, and you demonstrate, and the student can only become proficient at it by doing it himself and feeling how his hips move and how to get beneath his opponent's center of gravity and the way in which the other person's arm wedges into the crook of his arm. Once you know it, you can watch someone else doing it and say "No, that's not quite right," but you can't necessarily articulate, in formal bullet-pointed rules, why it's not right. If you're a really good teacher you can explain some of it, but you still won't be able to talk them through a correct technique, they have to get the motions down themselves.Anyone who's ever beta-read a manuscript for other writers (or just read a book with unimpressive prose) and had a definite sense that something in the writing just doesn't work but had problems explaining what was wrong with it other than in vague generalities knows what I mean.In, Landon tries to break down what makes a truly well-written sentence, and the techniques you need to build them.Now, one of the common bits of wisdom you will see in almost every modern writing book is to keep your sentences short. Long sentences are bad, say the style mavens. They require long reader attention spans, they are potentially confusing, they lack clarity, they are not effective communication. Strip away all those dangling clauses and modifying prepositions! 40-word sentences are an abomination before Strunk & White!Balderdash, says Landon. Longer sentences are more artful, more informative, more pleasurable to read, and better.Now that he's up-ended that bit of conventional wisdom, he spends this book, which is really his university course in book form, explaining it. Of course not every sentence should be a long concatenation of clauses; short sentences are fine too, they have their place. Equally obviously, sentences aren't better just because they're longer; a bad long sentence is more painful than a bad short one.Faulkner, that famous master of the long sentence, is mentioned frequently, but it is also pointed out that he wrote plenty of short sentences. Not all of Faulkner's prose is Faulknerian.Nor was the famously sparse Hemingway always sparse and brief, as Landon shows us several of Hemingway's longer sentences.So how does one go about writing good long sentences?Did you know there is such a thing as compositional theory? And that composers and rhetoricians have an entire science of sentence construction?is not a nitpicky grammar guide, nor a creative writing styleguide. It's a heavy-weight study of sentence theory, with some very effective exercises at the end of each chapter, but Brooks Landon is a college professor and this book is one of the "Great Courses" offered on CD and it shows - he starts with an introduction to the science and terminology of the "periodic sentence" and goes on to describe the different forms of cumulative and suspensive syntax: coordinate, subordinate, and mixed. Going beyond the Rule of Three, he discusses when you should go for three, when you should stick to two, and when you can go hog-wild with four or more in a pattern.You probably know what alliteration and assonance means. Maybe you are also familiar with anaphora and parallelism. How about anadiplosis, chiasmus, epanalepsis, and polyptotonic and polysyndetonic sentences? No? Well, you will know them when you see them, because every writer uses at least a few of them, but this book puts a name to a vast arsenal of constructions drawing on terminology dating back to Aristotle. Knowing the terms isn't the point, but thinking about how you can make sentences better by being deliberate in your constructions is.So, will this book make you a better writer? Only inasmuch as it makes you think about your sentences, which I am now doing. It's a crunchy text on sentence theory and it makes a strong argument for style being a thing that actually exists in tangible and identifiable (if not quantifiable) form.But, it's not the sort of book for the right-brained thinker who thinks their muse needs a little more book-learning. It's the sort of book for a serious stylist who approaches writing as craft as well as art, who wants to be Nabokov or Cormac McCarthy, spending a great deal of time refining and whittling away at sentences to make them masterful, like a sculptor chiseling in marble, not the sort of the writer who just unleashes words on a page and then hopes to corral them into something prettier and more grammatical on the second pass.Things I learned from this book: invisible propositions support visible sentences. Do not be afraid of long sentences! Coordinative and subordinative structures are key. And there are techniques, with names, for writing master sentences, and being aware of them will help you determine whether you have written one or not. And give you practice writing them.But none of this will help your plots, your characters, or whatever inner spark of genius you do or do not possess. So your master sentences need to be supported by practice and all the other writing arts. You need to come up with the words yourself.Also, it will reinforce those of us who believe that good writing is a thing, and not some nebulous unicorn no one can see, let alone catch.