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Sentence Tip #4 - The Puzzle and Payoff of Periodic Sentences

March 9th, 2007 | editing, sentence tips, writing

You know the story of Archimedes. Given the task of making sure the king’s crown was pure gold, he puzzled and puzzled (til his puzzler was sore). Then he took a bath. And noticed the water level rise as he entered the tub.

Suddenly the answer came to him.

If the king’s crown displaced as much water as an equal amount of pure gold, then the king’s crown was pure.

“Eureka!” he shouted. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”

And he ran through the streets, naked in his joy.

James Joyce talked about moments like this. He called them “epiphanies.” (Christians know the word from the church calendar and the Feast of Epiphany when they celebrate the “shining forth” of God’s glory.) Joyce coined the secular meaning in his manuscript Stephen Hero, when Stephen says:

By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.

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.)

A period sentence is the opposite of a loose sentece. Rather than beginning with the subject and predicate, a period sentence ends with the subject and predicate.

Here is a simple example from Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Lewis from 1798:

If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.

And this one attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he is trying to run away, it’s best to let him run.  

And this one by Dorothy Parker:

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.  

(She has another hilarious one, but I thought I shouldn’t post it here. Wouldn’t be prudent.) 

In each of these periodic sentences, the reader must wade through some introductory dependent clauses and descriptive phrases. Conditional sentences like these are nearly always periodic.

And you can see the effect they have on the reader.

They work like puzzles. Each sentence creates a little bit of suspense as you read it, wondering (unconsciously perhaps) how the author is going to tie this together. In the examples I’ve listed, the final independent clauses (in bold above) act like punchlines. In some ways, they are punchlines.

Good periodic sentences always punch the reader at the end.

The provide an aha moment. If you do puzzles, you are maybe just a little bit addicted to aha moments and epiphanies and “Eureka’s!” that give you an excuse to run through the street naked.

The aha moment that comes when you solve a puzzle is the same thing that patient readers get when they finish a good periodic sentence.

Like this one by John Donne from Meditation 17. He wonders if the person for whom the church bell rings can even hear it. “PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him.” Then he offers us this powerful periodic sentence, whose conclusion is so haunting it has made the meditation famous:

As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all.

Yikes. That’s the power of a good periodic sentence.

Of course, unecessarily complicated, self-indulgent sentences that follow every rabbit trail the author can think of, dropping in little quotes from obscure famous writers, or obscure famous politicians, or even more obscure (and arguably not at all famous) philosophers, little more than acts of bravado wherein authors point to themselves and practically shout, ”Hey, look at me! See how long I can write dependent clauses and phrases before I give the final simple, independent clause? Aren’t I great?” all the while forgetting that such a sentence needs a powerful and thought-provoking independent clause to make the effort worthwhile for the reader and often failing to provide such an important payoff, these bad periodic sentences just confuse your readers.

Heh. Heh. Heh.

I’d love to hear you all try your hands at a good periodic sentence—nothing too elaborate and wacky like that last one, mind you.

More resources on sentences:

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