Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

by Constance Hale

some combustible mix of passion

and desperation

Language is paradox.

Walt Whitman, who ridiculed the “dictionary makers,” insisting that language has its base “broad and low, close to the ground.”

English as a robust, swarthy tongue, capable of surviving tumult and thriving on change.

T. S. Eliot once argued that a language with identical spoken and written forms would be “practically intolerable,” since no one would listen to the first or read the second. Eliot was c...

demanding that people “write as they speak,” can put a higher premium on the pedestrian than on grace, style, and richness.

passion for new terms and easy abbreviation makes for readable emails, but discretion, sensitivity, and metaphor still matter.

William Zinsser, who distilled the wisdom of the ancients into what he called, in his classic On Writing Well, “four articles of faith”: clarity, simplicity, brevity, and humanity.

Relish every word. Aim deep, but be simple. Take risks. Seek beauty. Find the right pitch.

covers the parts of speech and how to exploit them (in “Words”), shows the parts of a sentence and how to arrange them (in “Sentences”), and reveals how melody, rhythm, lyricism, and voice give prose its mystery (in “Music”).

“Bones”

grammar sermonette,

simple keys rather than r...

“Flesh”

the lesson on writing.

shows how the parts of speech, the elements of sentences, and the techniques of music give us...

“Cardinal...

true transgressions: errors made ...

disaster that lurks in mang...

debunks myths and shibboleths that often substitute for a real understanding of the u...

“Carnal Pleasures”

how, sometimes, writing works because it hews to the underlying codes of language.

writing works because it defies the code...

“Catechism”

lessons into practice.

instructional piece at the end ...

of the ch...

test your understanding of grammatical or stylistic ideas, and writing prompts will encourage...

a writer needs a command of language as much as a commanding idea.

“One pearl is better than a whole necklace of potatoes.”

well-crafted prose depends on the writer’s ability to distinguish between pearls and potatoes. Only some words are fit to be strung into a given sentence.

True prose stylists carry on an impassioned lifelong love affair with words, banishing mediocre ones like so many uninteresting suitors, burnishing the good ones till they shimmer. Be infatuated, be seduced, be obsessed.

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on,” wrote the nineteenth-century essayist Henry Ward Beecher: words not linked to ideas are not worthy of writing—or reading.

test each term. Does it carry your idea? Does it express, exactly, that ...

whereas peach summons hot summers in Georgia and the cheeks of a Southern belle, mango conjures images of India and Mexico and the paintings of Gauguin.

Beyond the sense of a word is its sensuousness: its sound, its cadence, its spirit.

In turning a phrase, we want the words to build like a jazz riff, with the melodies of one word playing off the melodies of the others.

Verbose is not a synonym for literary. Let’s not forsake short, common words that name big things—hope and pride, for example—or simple couplings that leave strong impressions,

“Nine pounds where three are sufficient is obesity,” said Frank Lloyd Wright. “But to eliminate expressive words in speaking or writing—words that intensify

or vivify meaning—is not simplicity. It may be, or usually is, stupidity.”

Updike’s Rabbit at Rest.

even the smallest words (loud or excited? Bermuda grass or flat-bladed grass?) matter. Updike kept refining in every draft. He relished every word.

Don’t shun slang, especially when it’s vivid and musical and fills a gap in the lexicon.

Brevity isn’t everything.

It’s not just sound that gives a word beauty. It’s also

precision.

Some editors dumb down copy for mass audiences, preferring the short word to the long.

Djuna Barnes, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, or Toni Morrison—none of whom uses lowest-common-denominator diction.

starts with tight sentences and breaks open like the blossoms they describe. Her participles pour out. The words themselves glisten.