Customer Reviews

Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you care about language, and especially if you write, this is a book to have on hand. Virginia Tufte's project in Artful Sentences is not simply to explain the rules of English sentence structure, although the book is certainly useful in that regard. But Tufte seeks also to demonstrate what it is that turns syntax, in the hands of our greatest writers, into art. She shows how syntax can fuse with feeling and how, ultimately, it can become symbolic. This book will help the reader to appreciate verbal art, and it will help the writer to approach it.

Artful Sentences: Syntax As Style by Virginia Tufte (Distinguished Emeritas Professor of English at the University of Southern California) is a remarkable collection of over one-thousand sentences demonstrating the utilization of syntax to create a distinctive writing style, and which were selectively compiled by Professor Tufte from the works of authors published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Exemplifying the use of syntax to create a uniquely recognizable writing style, Artful Sentences features sentences showcasing every imaginable style as an writer, speechmaker, essayist, storyteller, and novelist, ranging from the example of Frank Lloyd Wright to David Gelernter. With a logical and definitive analysis of the actual root sentence structure, Artful Sentences is very strongly recommended for linguistics, literature, and English students, as well as aspiring authors seeking to distinguish their work in the highly competitive publishing marketplace.

I cannot put this book down. It is beautifully bound and published. Virginia's insight into sentence structure and style expose the sheer beauty of the English language. She talks of participles, prepositions, nouns, verbs, phrases, all as if they are musical notes in the great symphony of the sentence, the orchestration of the paragraph. Her examples are exquisite and she dissects each, how it flows, how each part of the sentences has a particular effect, how the effects impact the reader.
Buy this book, read it again and again.

I've given this book to friends who have given it to theirs. It's a book that sits on my library table instead of my bookshelf. I like to pick it up, and flip through the pages until I settle on an appealing passage. To characterize Artful Sentences as a book on grammar, or as a book written expressly for the classroom, is to miss the point (although I would surely assign it to students in a writing class, for my own pleasure as much as for pedagogical reasons). Tufte's prose is spare and elegant, complementing the nuanced quotes that she has selected to reinforce her points. Altogether this is a stimulating, delightful and substantive book.

This book was a discovery of the first order. I read the book through once. I saw immediately the value of it. I ripped the binding off, punched two holes, threaded rings through, and labeled section dividers to mark the chapters. This book -- along with my Gardiner, Strunk & White, Alderson, Truby, Baxter, Clark, and a few other essential tools -- sits on my desk, goes with me to cafes, and finds (a large) space in my briefcase when other books stay at home. Sentences are highlighted, my notes are in the margins, my questions marked with Post-its. It's an amazing, comprehensive work. The reader senses that each sample sentence was carefully chosen among many. I've memorized the author's "four action levels of the short sentence," her work in alternating transitive and intransitives verbs for specific purpose, her rare treatment of the varieties of the inverted sentence, and her important chapter on symbols. More laboring over each sentence type or phrase sub-type would have made a muddle. I appreciate the brevity, the clarity, and the exacting knowledge represented in this book. What a find!

This is a writerly book for lovers of language used well. It dissects sentence composition with amazing detail and insight, beginning with short declarative sentences and working up to longer and more complex forms. It is not a grammar reference; it is a study in masterly wordcraft, aimed at those who already understand the tools of language and wish to learn to employ them effectively.

Tufte classifies sentence types systematically, and demonstrates how each type contributes to the tone, rhythm, impact, and other aspects of the literary style of the written work. Every tiny variation is illustrated with well-chosen examples from works of quality. The collected content is an organized survey of sentence types and writing techniques, discussed and explained with expertise and sensitivity. She does not treat language as a grab-bag of specific tools, to be plugged into prose for particular effects; instead, she treats writing as a skillful art which can be approached deliberately and analyzed objectively, in ways that allow authors to achieve their own goals through purposeful application. The result is a painstaking study of the importance of sentence structure to the functioning of the sentence in the larger work - a technician's view of the workings of writing at the component level, written with an adept's finesse.

This book is a must for anyone who writes and is dedicated to their writing-craft, or for anyone who reads and aspires to a true appreciation of what writing is. It is a treasure of scholarship done brilliantly and with feeling.

After all of these wonderful reviews, I do not like to hit a discordant note. However, I was disappointed by this book. The sentences selected are definitely artful, as promised in the title, and the author's knowledge of syntax is complete. One would think that these two features alone would be enough to make it a fine book. It is not.

The author moves from one structure to another touching all of the syntactical bases. Seasoned with artful sentences I was not always able to make the connection between the syntax and the example. Here's the syntax structure, and now here are the examples. Next. The author marches on.

I still believe that if I read this book, simply by looking at all of the great sentences, I will get something out of it. Maybe if the author allowed herself to savor the sentences a bit more, I would not get the feeling of reading a recipe book that is labeled well but meaningless. So while I believe this book to be a grand idea, I did not find its execution grand at all.

Virginia Tufte continues where "Grammar as Style" left off. She analyzes different sentence types, breaks them down into phrases, clauses, literary terms, and parts of speech, adds an observation or two, and then gives you some tasty examples from famous and obscure writers. If you're a writer you'll be licking your lips as you read the examples. During my first read, I found the English teacher analysis a bit boring, and I didn't want to take the time to struggle with the terminology, but the examples were so exciting I'm sure I'll take the time to take the time to do so later. I'd recommend reading the examples first, and then later, if so inclined read the analysis.
Tuft, Christenson, and Landon all advocate writing a variety of sentences, longer sentences, as well as short sentences, which flies in the face of traditional writing instruction found in Strunk and most textbooks. "Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style" is a must for any serious writer. She examines short sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, adjectives and adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and coordination, dependent clauses, sentence openers and inversion, free modifiers, the appositive, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory, parallelism (balanced sentences), cohesion, and syntactic symbolism.
If you enjoy this book you might try Professor Brooks Landon's "Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft" from the Teaching Company, 24 lectures on DVD and/or CD.

Artful Sentences is a great book for grammar nerds. If you have your grammar down pat, this will be an easy read and very understandable. For the rest of us it can be a bit of a struggle, but still very worth the effort.

Tufte inspires but this volume will be sold when I'm done. The book that I turn to, every decade now for 40 years, is Francis Christensen "A New Rhetoric". Hard to find, but the finest advice on writing (narrative, discursive, whatever) in English.