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Sentence Tip #3 - Get Long and Loose and Conversational

March 1st, 2007 | blogging, editing, grammar, sentence tips, sentences, writing

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.

  1. The subject
  2. 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.

  1. Before the subject: Only God can make a tree.
  2. Between the subject and the predicate: God, the Creator of the Universe, can make a tree.
  3. 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:

(It should be no surprise to people that “Tongue Thrust” is PG-13).

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