Beginning Monday evening, February 9, from 6:00 to 7:00 CT, Writing Smartly will again offer its four-week online short course entitled Reading Closely to Write. Each week we will examine the structure and stylistic design of sentences from one short story (each averaging about 15 pages) written by a celebrated author.

We will analyze the grammar and composition of certain significant sentences from each story, and consider how other designs the author could have chosen would have produced different effects. Our emphasis will be on the grammar and language of the reading so that we can begin to develop an eye and ear for discovering our own natural written voice. By considering linguistic forms closely like this, we can come to appreciate the craft of language, training ourselves to discern assumptions and question implications—all to become more thoughtful about what we read and hear.

New selections this term will be from Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (Dell Publishing, 1982), readily available at Amazon and elsewhere. Tuition for this four-session online short course is $350, paid through Zelle (ultimo@writingsmartly.com), or by personal check (please email me for the mailing address). Tuition this term will include one optional 45-minute session of private instruction where you may discuss your own writing, or learn more about the points of grammar and style we discussed in the course. Upon your registration, I will reply with a confirmation and the Zoom link for the course.

I hope you can join us as we await the spring.

***

When we say that an essay we’ve read or a speech we’ve heard was edifying, what do we mean? To be edified refers to the idea of being improved by something morally. We’re not edified in reading a car repair manual or hearing a technical explanation of how electricity works, but we are when an author or speaker has managed to touch upon certain notions fundamental to our humanity and in doing so has moved us—not only emotionally but so deeply that we feel the better for it because we realize we have been enlightened to some degree. We understand ourselves a measure more.

A phrase like moral improvement is now, we must admit, hopelessly antiquated, in part because we’ve lost the original meaning of the adjective moral, which had to do at first with the entire tendency, or facing direction, of one’s character, not one’s religious inclinations alone. And if edification has something to do with morality in this wider sense, then it will only complicate our question to learn that the word edify has the strangest of origins. It derives from the Latin noun for a building, a linguistic lineage we can still see in our word edifice. So what in the world could be the connection between edification and an edifice, and what might any of that have to do with language and the liberal arts?

We might be able to see a connection between the deeper self-awareness we call edification and the physical structure we call an edifice with the help of the noun improvement in that obsoleted phrase moral improvement, for we do speak of improving both an architectural structure and one’s character. When we apply the same word (whether noun or verb) to two such very different realities, it is likely we see something common between them. Both of these, after all, are things we build, and perhaps they are both structures which can be built in a way that makes possible a certain life within them—the one material and the other intellectual. Both in their own way are properly human.

It may be, moreover, that when we speak of being edified by words whether written or spoken—or indeed by some deliberate, uplifting behavior we witness—we are sensing ourselves affected by the kind of life which had developed under the shelter of a well-constructed character, a life whose intentions and actions have arisen within the space that an intellectual edifice had made possible. Perhaps that, then, suggests a connection between edification and language and the liberal arts: that in our intellectual life, we do not so much as make a living or life for ourselves, as we build the structure, the edifice, in which that life can protectively take root.

And there is more insight to be had on this in the fact that an edifice originally in Latin denoted a temple (aedes), an appointed, not furnished, building, a work of human construction wherein dwelled realities not human. A temple, like the human mind, was a place to attend to, not an enclosure to live within. It was the open but guarded space of the temple, as of any large building or home, which was its essential element. The ability and the freedom to come and go from a temple or from a home or from one’s own thoughts is wherein its value lies. This is the higher meaning behind naming the liberal arts liberal—because those are the studies which can make one’s own highest freedom possible. What liberal studies bring about is precisely what is absent when we cannot find serious persons to protect a vision and lead a people.

I came across recently an old guide to books and reading which quotes a former president of Harvard as saying that fifteen minutes a day with good literature will accrue the basics of a liberal education. Curiously, an old college professor of mine, a deeply cultured teacher of steady, quiet, intelligent mien, used to say the same. The study of the liberal arts, which at its foundation is the study of language, can build such a lodging for us—at once an edifice, an edification, and a serious education.

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Upcoming Short Course

Beginning Monday evening, February 9, from 6:00 to 7:00 CT, Writing Smartly will offer again its four-week online short course entitled Reading Closely to Write. Each week we will examine the structure and stylistic design of sentences from one short story (each averaging about 15 pages) written by a celebrated author.

We will analyze the grammar and composition of certain significant sentences from each story, and consider how other designs the author could have chosen would have produced different effects. Our emphasis will be on the grammar and language of the reading so that we can begin to develop an eye and ear for discovering our own natural written voice. By considering linguistic forms closely like this, we can come to appreciate the craft of language, training ourselves to discern assumptions and question implications—all to become more thoughtful about what we read and hear.

New selections this term will be from Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (Dell Publishing, 1982), readily available at Amazon and elsewhere. Tuition for this four-session online short course is $350, paid through Zelle (ultimo@writingsmartly.com), or by personal check (please email me for the mailing address). Tuition this term will include one optional 45-minute session of private instruction where you may discuss your own writing, or learn more about the points of grammar and style we discussed in the course. Upon your registration, I will reply with a confirmation and the Zoom link for the course.

I hope you can join us as we all await the spring.

***

Beginning Monday evening, February 9, from 6:00 to 7:00 CT, Writing Smartly will offer again its four-week online short course entitled Reading Closely to Write. Each week we will examine the structure and stylistic design of sentences from one short story (each averaging about 15 pages) written by a celebrated author.

We will analyze the grammar and composition of certain significant sentences from each story, and consider how other designs the author could have chosen would have produced different effects. Our emphasis will be on the grammar and language of the reading so that we can begin to develop an eye and ear for discovering our own natural written voice. By considering linguistic forms closely like this, we can come to appreciate the craft of language, training ourselves to discern assumptions and question implications—all to become more thoughtful about what we read and hear.

New selections this term will be from Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (Dell Publishing, 1982), readily available at Amazon and elsewhere. Tuition for this four-session online short course is $350, paid through Zelle (ultimo@writingsmartly.com), or by personal check (please email me for the mailing address). Tuition this term will include one optional 45-minute session of private instruction where you may discuss your own writing, or learn more about the points of grammar and style we discussed in the course. Upon your registration, I will reply with a confirmation and the Zoom link for the course.

I hope you can join us as we all await the spring.

***

 

 

Counterfactual reasoning is an attempt to see what can be learned by assuming things otherwise than what they are. It’s an intellectually respectable game that can be played with almost any subject to see more deeply than we might have at first. In grammatical terms a counterfactual is a condition contrary to fact, and with language and literature, we might call it a contrary explication, where we begin by understanding an author’s original composition and then ask how that intended effect might have been different had other choices in construction been made.

Here are the first five sentences of James Joyce’s story “The Boarding House,” a short tale depicting the unsuspected complexity of human character which might lie beneath its ostensible intent, come to light here in Joyce’s story through the figures of the proprietress Mrs. Mooney, her daughter, and a young boarder. We may easily expect the eventuality which results, but we’re left wondering at the end whether maternal protection might not also at times be skeined with a secret (but loving?) scheme. Joyce blazes his story onto the page with a short, simple, and metaphorically foreshadowing sentence, followed by four more of interesting designs. Keep your eye on the sentence types (simple, compound, or complex) and the punctuation:

Mrs. Mooney was a butcher’s daughter. She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself: a determined woman. She had married her father’s foreman and opened a butcher’s shop near Spring Gardens. But as soon as his father-in-law was dead Mr. Mooney began to go to the devil. He drank, plundered the till, ran head-long into debt.

We remember that every clause, every combination of subject and predicate, expresses a thought. When a statement has only one such independent assertion, it constitutes a simple sentence, and the first sentence here serves to make a singular pronouncement of sorts, identifying the subject, Mrs. Mooney, with her slaying parentage. Obvious enough, but reading closely we should ask why Joyce does this, because he could have identified the subject with myriad other personal characteristics: her appearance, her health, her dreams, or hopes, or fears, and done so in a long and winding and inviting compound sentence. But he introduces her to us simply and directly as a butcher’s daughter, and expects us, no doubt, to hear certain overtones, whichever we may catch, and to anticipate other notes which will harmonize with them as the story proceeds. At the very least, the decisiveness of the sentence is to suggest Mrs. Mooney’s own.

Joyce’s second sentence employs a colon, and that too is worth thinking about. This mark of punctuation is meant to draw us up fast and sudden to the edge of an explanation or exemplification. The complex design of the sentence now asserts outright that being a determined woman is the result of Mrs. Mooney’s keeping things, quite ably, to herself; she is as decisive, we now know, as the arm of her butcher father. This second sentence, then, builds out from the first, to enlink three ideas—butchering, self-knowledge (of a sort), and determination—in depicting the story’s protagonist. We, of course, are meant to wonder why.

But how would that clear, swift picture have been different had Joyce composed the phrase after the colon as an expanded clause: She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself and she was determined to get what she wanted in life? The reference to life would have connected with the biographical details that follow in the third sentence smoothly enough, but changing the grammatical elements like this would have introduced another articulated thought altogether (every clause being a thought), and the assertion that she was determined would have simply reported another color of her character rather than implying, as it does in the short, concentrated phrase of the original, an impending consequence of that singular, though double-edged, trait.

And look at the last sentence of this passage. That one statement comprises three clauses, and there is no conjunction present to connect them. This rhetorical design is called asyndeton (the omission of conjunctions), and it has the effect of compressing, and thereby increasing the power of, each assertion. It works powerfully here because it rifles off the specific consequences of the immediately preceding sentence, that Mr. Mooney began to go to the devil. Had Joyce designed the sentence with the opposite technique called polysyndeton (the accumulation of conjunctions), the effect would have been weaker and out of keeping with the clear-cut picture he had been drawing: He drank and plundered the till and ran head-long into debt. That sentence sweeps where the original fires. Conjunctions always work logically, explanatorily, and including the conjunctions like this would have impeded the emotional power of the original three-shot sentence. The explicitness of this revision would have been patient with Mr. Mooney’s walk to the devil; Joyce’s original is tacitly censoring.

If we can learn to play this counterfactual game every once in a while with a passage we find compelling in its original, we can find our way both to a deeper appreciation of what an author accomplished and to more confidence in revising our own compositions. In any creative undertaking, imagination and reflection yield ideas to us, but the expression of those ideas, the shape and form we give them, is ours to cut and trim and join and polish. And to learn to do that, we must read closely.

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Another Short Course Coming in February

Joyce’s story, along with fours others by William Carlos Williams, Jean Stafford, H. L. Davis and Elizabeth Parsons we have looked at here in recent weeks, will be the last of the five we will be reading and discussing in an upcoming new offering of Writing Smartly’s four-week online short course called Reading Closely to Write. As in the past, we will examine each week the grammatical structure and stylistic design of sentences from one or two short stories written by celebrated authors. Each story averages about fifteen pages, and our effort will be to see more deeply into the meaning and implication of the author’s written composition.

The exact dates and time of the course will be set this week, but if you have questions in the meantime (or if you would like to express your intention to enroll), please email me directly at ultimo@writingsmartly.com.

I hope you can join us for a winter of close reading as we await the welcome of spring.

***

Draw a square in your imagination, and then from the two top points extend diagonal lines to transform that square into a cube. A few more lines up, down, and crosswise, and what you first perceived as a flat surface has taken on volume, another dimension. We can accomplish this same effect in written composition, and the technique lies in grammatical design.

When we write in sentences and paragraphs to describe or explain a set of circumstances, we are composing what is called prose. The opposite of prose is poetry, whose intent is not to indicate ideas, but to evoke the feelings that accompany those ideas, to appeal not only to the mind, but to the heart, which holds the mind, as well. The noun prose refers to our ordinary, everyday language, and that noun is connected to the adjective prosaic, meaning the factual, the usual. We might even say the flat and  two-dimensional—or so it appears most of the time. But very often the closer we look at the commonplace, the richer a scene of supporting players and overhanging background comes into view.

Here is a passage from a very short and preoccupying little story entitled “The Use of Force,” by the American writer William Carlos Williams. The narrator is a physician (as was Williams himself) who has come to the home of a young girl sick with a fever for days. Her worried parents have summoned the doctor, and she, terrified and silent, will not let him approach:

As I moved my chair a little nearer suddenly with one catlike movement both her hands clawed instinctively for my eyes and she almost reached them too. In fact, she knocked my glasses flying and they fell, though unbroken, several feet away from me on the kitchen floor.

The second sentence here illustrates how a participle, the word flying, can combine in one word what would otherwise be more routinely asserted separately in another distinct clause. To write she knocked my glasses flying is to overlay two clauses: she knocked my glasses and they flew to the floor. That would be the flat, factual, police report-like depiction of the event. But a participle is an adjective built from a verb, and so resolving the latter clause into the participle flying superimposes the two events into a richer, because more involved, object of thought. The participial scene points to the fact that the glasses flew to the floor, but it does not say so flat out. The idea is still there, but it remains seen, not explicitly heard. That creates a larger, quicker, more sophisticated moment in which to contemplate the consequences of the event. Technically. flying now modifies glasses, and since glasses is the direct object of knocked, and therefore in the predicate of that clause, the participle flying is acting as what is called an object complement. The term complement always refers in grammar to an element in a predicate.

Another sentence of Williams’s in this same story illustrates one more way the participle can amend mere factual statements into a more energetic scene for the reader to step into. After their daughter had lashed out at the good doctor, her mother and father, Williams writes, “almost turned themselves inside out in embarrassment and apology.” “You bad girl, said the mother, taking her and shaking her by one arm.” We will usually say that the participles taking and shaking are modifying the noun mother, but that, to be exact, is only half correct. A participle is a verbal adjective, and to its adjectival extent we can accurately speak of its modifying, by way of describing, the noun with which it is associated.

But the additional verbal character of a participle points to something else. Where nouns work with adjectives, verbs work with adverbs, and so these two participles, taking and shaking, are doing more than adjectivally modifying the noun mother: they are also bringing the reader’s attention to the actions the mother is effectuating, and that allusion keeps the energy underway as we imagine the scene unfolding on more than one visual level. A circumstantial depth has been added, and that makes what we are reading more complex and therefore more interesting. When a participle modifies a subject in a predicate like this (and here that predicate is implied, not stated: taking and shaking her is an abridgement of the two clauses she took her and shook her), the syntax is termed a subject complement.

There are still more participial constructions than just these, but all come down to this: participles can add an unsuspected dimension to a sentence and scene. Where a subject and verb together make an indicative, two-dimensional statement, a participle will add volume to that planar area, extending the lines of the simple subject and predicate into a more theatrical three-dimensional space by pointing hintingly, winkingly to the enlivened circumstances surrounding the central action. We know this is the case, and we can appreciate it as we read, when we understand what the participle is—a linguistic device of impressive subtlety.

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Another Short Course Coming in February

Williams’s story, along with three others by Jean Stafford, H. L. Davis and Elizabeth Parsons we have looked at in recent weeks, will be another of the five we will be reading and discussing in an upcoming new offering of Writing Smartly’s four-week online short course called Reading Closely to Write. As in the past, we will examine each week the grammatical structure and stylistic design of sentences from one or two short stories written by celebrated authors. Each story averages about fifteen pages, and our effort will be to see more deeply into the meaning and implication of the author’s written composition.

The exact dates and time of the course will be set next week, but if you have questions in the meantime (or if you would like to express your intention to enroll), please email me directly at ultimo@writingsmartly.com.

I hope you can join us for a winter of close reading as we await the welcome of spring.

***