Semantics, Syntax and Split Infinitives, Oh My!

A Google image search of "words" turned out to be quite fruitful.

You know you've made a good choice in grad school programs when a required class that you didn't expect to like finds its way under your skin. Such is the case with History of English Prose Style, which on its face sounds not at all riveting; in fact by the course description I really had no idea what the class was about:

This course seeks to make meaningful distinctions among various prose styles in two ways: first, by considering alternative theoretical approaches to the study of style, ranging from the purely impressionistic to the rigorously quantitative; second, by exploring the rhetorical dimension of stylistic choice by examining the intersection of style and rhetoric in English prose from the Renaissance to the present, including writings by John Lyly, Thomas Browne, Elizabeth I, Addison and Steele, John Ruskin, Thomas Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I mean, that sounds impressive, but in practice I had literally no clue what the class would actually cover. I cheerfully signed up for it anyway and just hoped that it would somehow be useful in my development as a writer.

It turns out that it boils down to studying the style of writing -- ie the sentence-level elements like structure, word order, figures of speech, etc. Our working hypothesis is that you cannot strip away these stylistic elements -- for example, an author's incorporation of repetitive schemes like isocolon and alliteration -- without taking away some of the meaning. In other words, style and content are inextricably intertwined (hey there alliteration!), and if we understand why the author made the stylistic choices they made, then we can start to gain an understanding of the author's epistemic world view.

I'll insert a note here to remind the reader that I am a graduate student in the study of English writing, and yet this class made me realize that I was never once taught the basics of English grammar. Like, clauses and phrases and predicates and participials and basically why we put words in the order that we do. Understanding syntax -- the combination of words that indicates their relationship to one another in a sentence -- is apparently the key to being a good writer. A high school diploma and a Bachelor's degree, and no one really ever explained that to me until now.

Anyway, as one example of how style impacts prose, our professor had us read a piece written in 1578 by John Lyly. Think of it as a 16th century Oprah's Book Club choice. Everyone who's anyone read it, including a moderately famous contemporary of Lyly's named William Shakespeare. (He was 14 when it was written.) Lyly writes in a way that would make a high school freshman and a college professor weep, but for completely different reasons. (If you're super curious, you can read the piece -- titled "Euphues: The anatomy of wit" -- here. Jump to page 33.) Eventually the prose came to be seen as outdated -- think still talking like a 1980's Valley Girl in the year 2010 -- but it's a really amazing example of what can be done with antithesis and repetitive structures to reinforce the ideas expressed in the content of the piece. In other words, if you're going to compare two things, Lyly showed us how you can write it in a way where the sentences are balanced to the point of ridiculousness, to better make your point.

Lyly was also a big fan, at least in this piece, of playing with the sounds of words. A typical Lyly sentence: "[I]t is no marvel that the son, being left rich by his father's will, become retchless by his own will." See what he did there?

Our assignment for the week was to replicate Lyly's prose style. Mine isn't perfect, but I'm posting it up here as an example. Note the parallel structure and use of opposite ideas (lawless harmony, lascivious entropy) to make the point. Enjoy, and go forth about your day pondering how the public education system is completely failing us when it comes to teaching basic English grammar.

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It may be that a mother’s love is unconditional, a child’s trust complete, the bond between the two absolute—but what guarantees this connection? One look into the eyes of the infant born of her may be enough to bring any woman of any level of maternal nature to her knees, but how is she to maintain this relationship with one whose eventual humor she cannot foresee, whose sense of wit may be overlooked given the child’s garish characteristics? What natural fortune can this child expect, when her mother’s own unfortunate circumstance was to bear a baby amounting to such a ghastly abomination of nature?

Surely the father is not to be left out of blame; he was present when her entry to the world was painfully wrought, the future population perceptively wronged. Through her wide-set eyes stares the narrowness of a soul without a trace of means or modesty, a person whose holed pockets can do nothing to contain the whole of her ego. Her perfume may be stridently pungent, but her manner is surreptitiously repugnant. Her upbringing stressed lawful harmony, but her subsistence relies upon lascivious entropy. She prefers the payoff before the production, the profit before the performance, the promotion before the presentation.

I mean not to suggest, having evidenced my hypothesis that her existence is unsavory, that her very animation lends itself to the inanity, or even that her parents are to be shackled and shellacked—though I would be dishonest to claim that the thought had not entered my mind. Rather, would you not also conclude that, based upon the evidence, perhaps some sort of winch should be employed to ensure that this particular wench is denied admission to this painstakingly selective program of higher learning?

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Special shout-outs to Chrissie Watras and Liz Tavares, who will enjoy this post more than anyone else, and who also help me process my homework each week. Thanks ladies.