Eye Infection

When I find a new idea, I see the world with new eyes. I can't help it; it's everywhere I look. Take cumulative syntax, for example. I just finished Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft from the Teaching Company1, which has as its core the idea that cumulative grammar is an under-taught tool in composition classes. Cumulative sentences are those that have a (generally) short base clause and (often numerous) free modifying phrases hung off of it. Here's a fun cumulative sentence, taken (more or less) straight from the course:

He drove carefully, the wind whipping his shaggy blonde hair, the wrap-around sunglasses shielding his eyes, a grim smile crossing his face, a .38 Police Special on the passenger seat beside him, the corpse stuffed in the trunk.

Or another:

They sat, he with his dour expression, the one reserved for funerals and government officials, she with her smile, the one that never left her face, both of them taking their places at the heavy wooden table, the mounds of paperwork all around them.

The course instructor likes these types of sentences because they start with something simple, something the audience can easily grasp. Then they start adding details, piling on descriptions and modifiers, building something more complex, something that if you tried to build with bound modifiers would collapse under its own weight before you ever found the verb.2

So of course, having been exposed to this idea, I'm now seeing analogues of cumulative syntax everywhere. That first example shows how you can start a story in one place and end in quite a different one, one that is still obviously connected to the beginning but whose conclusion, or even subject, you could not have predicted from its opening. I'm noticing that some of my favorite bloggers/essayists3 use this style, and it's something I want to do more of in my own writing. The second example shows how you can layer on detail without much forward motion, detail that forces the reader to keep going back to re-evaluate and re-envision the simple idea they started with. When I first encountered these sort of sentences in the course, I found them hard to follow. Once I got used to them, however, I found them much richer and nuanced than their non-cumulative counterparts. I keep seeing a parallel here with the Dresden Files RPG, in the way the commentary on the main text forces you to continually stop and re-evaluate it. It was confusing at first, but ultimately provided me with a more satisfying experience.

Like I said, when I find a new idea, I see it everywhere.

1 I've to listened and enjoyed several of their audio courses, including their excellent pair on the history of Western music and the history of opera.

2 And yes, I'm having fun using cumulative syntax in this post.

3 Notably Rands and Susan Schorn.