Fancy grammarians call them cumulative sentences. (Not to be confused with cumulus clouds.) The rest of us just call them loose. Like a pair of comfortable jeans. Like one of my daughter’s lower incisors. Like a lot of what Hemingway wrote.
And they are the easiest kinds of sentences to write. Anyone can do it. Here’s how.
The trick is not to give you more information than you need. For now, don’t worry about the difference between clauses and phrases, complex and compound. If you know what those are, great! If you don’t, just understand that a simple sentence includes two elements.
- The subject
- The predicate
And the “predicate” is a fancy word that basically means “the verb and everything that comes after it.”
So here is a good simple sentence: God can make a tree.
Subject + Predicate
(God) + (can make a tree.)
Now we can add bits to different parts of the sentence to describe the subject or the predicate. These bits go in one of three places.
- Before the subject: Only God can make a tree.
- Between the subject and the predicate: God, the Creator of the Universe, can make a tree.
- After the predicate: God can make a tree with rings or without, but he could have made them with rings, growing the tree from seed, growing the seed from his creativity because with the Lord a day is like a thousand years. (Oh no! I took the bait.)
To the point, Cumulative Sentences add stuff after the predicate. Like this quote from John Kennedy:
I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.
Or this one by Hemingway from the beginning of “Big Two-Hearted River: Part 1” . . .
“[Nick] watched [the trout] holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glass convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge.
And here’s the way these sentences affect a reader. They are logically deductive. They present a supposition—the simple sentence—and then they take off running. And we tend to talk like this. So if you are aiming for a conversational style, but you still like long complex sentences, what do you do? Write cumulative sentences.
Long sentences are always a little bit harder to read, but cumulative sentences are the easiest hard ones to read.
We make a thought, throw it out into the conversation or into the blogosphere, and we wait to see where it will go, to see what other thoughts can we add to it or else we get lost in our words and start rambling and going on and on and on and on like a teenager who’s had too much coffee.
How fun is this? Wanna practice? Take the original simple sentence and make it cumulative.
God can make a tree.
(You may want to read Craver’s philosophical post first.)
More resources on cumulative sentences:
- Capital Community College on Sentence Variety
- Collin County Community College on “Loose” Sentences
- I Gots Style by Tongue Thrust
(It should be no surprise to people that “Tongue Thrust” is PG-13).
18 comments ↓
Mark, I absolutely adore your site. This post is so incredibly informative. Do you edit manuscripts (guess I should look at your bio…)
Well, Lisa, my goodness. Thanks for your kind words. I do edit manuscripts from time to time, but I try to be very careful not to let my freelance fun interfere with my family time.
Oh, look! This door seems to be wide open. I dare say I shall venture in.
I’m glad you referenced the verse from 2nd Peter, because I wanted to point out that God, not being limited by time, as we are, can make a tree, (or anything for that matter) starting from nothing, taking His sweet time, and still produce a mature, fruit-bearing tree before a solar day is complete. Notice that the Bible speaks that way (2nd Peter) specifically about God’s plan of salvation, and not specifically about creation. In fact, every time the Bible specifically refers to creation, (such as when explaining Sabbath law) it talks in terms of days, not ages or events.
Nice cumulative sentence there Craver.
Are we fishing or making house calls? The metaphor got mixed, so I’m confused.
You make an excellent point about 1 Peter referring to the day of the Lord rather than creation. I hadn’t thought of that.
No takers on the assignment?
I meant no other takers, of course. Craver already got his A+.
God can make a tree, but because we are all God’s creations, and because we each perceive the world through our own senses and experiences, each tree God creates has the potential to create billions of experiences, and over time, the number of possible experiences begins to approach an uncountable number, proving that God’s wisdom (even in creating a single tree) is TRULY infinite!
Mike–or is it BillRay?–
Great sentence! Man, I love good sentences. And such a fun direction you’ve taken it.
Just goes to show I’m not all Falstaff! (I could never drink that stuff…)
Falstaff was the queen’s favorite character! But it’s good to hear that you don’t have his problems of excess.
Mark, Very interesting again. I tend to want to avoid those kind of sentences. Though I’ll bet I do that sometimes. I’ve kind of noticed a bit of those type of sentences in N.T. Wright’s book, “Simply Christian”, which I’m reading- I think.
Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” was a treat for me. Rare, since I don’t ordinarily take to fiction.
Maybe it’s a good change of pace to do that in writing, here and there, to keep your reader from being lulled to sleep, and maybe forget to read the book again, since “out of sight, out of mind”.
Ha.
Ted, I think you hit the target. Sentence variety is the literary equivalent of a speaker who engages the audience with vocal variety and such.
For example, I adore certain incredible theologians who I will leave unnamed here, but listening to their recordings from Laity just lulls me to sleep.
Simply Christian is on my shelf waiting patiently. I should probably pick it up again!
God, with his unlimited creativity can ultimately adjust the color from green to pink, if he so wishes, when he makes a tree for us humans to gaze upon, eat from and appreciate.
Jessica, great work! My daughter would love pink trees.
If only more people appreciated trees of any color…
I belive the appreciation begins in the home. I am an avid gardener and couldn’t imagine if trees only came in one shape, size or colour.
The ornamental cherry trees blossom in about a month here in Vancouver BC. I’ll post some pictures when they begin to bloom. Your daughter would like them. They are all pink and burgundy. When the wind blows it is as if the rain is scented petals here in spring.
Have a great day Mark.
I tend to prefer shorter sentences that don’t appear to be run-ons at first glance, but I am willing to attempt this new (new to me) style of sentence for the purpose of practice in the fine art of writing and to test how long I can blab on about who-knows-what.
[...] OK, class. Now what kind of sentences are those? Cumulative! Loose! Yes! They start with a simple beginning: “By an epiphany he meant…” and “He believed that…” Joyce would use loose sentence structures because his stream of consciousness style attempted to imitate human thought and interior dialogue. (Remember from sentence tip #3 that we tend to speak in loose sentence structure.) [...]
Eve, I completely agree with you. In general, I prefer short punchy sentences, or simple compound sentences.
The key to good prose is really the quantity of the tricks in your toolbox, though. Sentence variety is a important trick to understand fully, I think.