Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon Read Free Book Online

combine not words, but the propositions those words stand for or refer to.
    Let’s take a look at some of the ways we can join propositions. Sentences can coordinate propositions by putting them side by side. For example, I might combine two propositions with a conjunction: “I like to read and I like to write.” Or I might subordinate one to another: “I, who like to write, also like to read.” Or I might mark temporal or causal relationships: “Because I like to write I like to read” or “After I enjoy reading something, I like to start writing.”
    Let’s return to that sentence from the
Port-Royal Grammar
: “Invisible God created the visible world.” Let’s look a bit more closely at the underlying propositions neither Chomsky nor the Port Royal Grammarians thought deserving of mention.
    First, that God exists, there is a God, and that the world exists, there is a world. Certainly that first proposition remains a subject of some debate today, and at least among some philosophies, the proposition that the world exists also remains an active question. And underlying the notion that God created the world is the proposition that God is powerful enough to have done so. I’m stretching a point, but what I hope you’ll see is that the sentence “Invisible God created the visible world” actually rests upon a number of unstated, unwritten propositions. Moreover, those propositions might have been implied or acknowledged by writing this sentence in a number of different ways.
    For instance, the sentence might have been written, “God is invisible, and the world is visible, and God created the world”; or “God is invisible, and God created the world, and the world is visible”; or “God, who is invisible, created the world, which is visible”; or “God, being invisible, created the world, it being visible”; or “Being invisible, God created the world, which is visible.” Or we could have shifted the focus of the sentence from God to the world: “The world is visible and it was created by God, and God is invisible” or “The world is visible, and God is invisible, and the world was created by God” or “The visible world was created by invisible God” or “The world, which is visible, was created by God, who is invisible” or “Being visible, the world was created by invisible God” and so on.
    Even more of the underlying propositions might have been brought to the surface of the sentence. For instance, “There is a God, and God is invisible, and God created the world” or “There is a world and the world is visible, and there is a God and God is invisible, and God created the world” or “There is a God who is invisible and God created the world, which is visible” or “There is a God who is invisible, and there is a world, which is visible, and God created the world” or “There is a world which is visible and the world was created by God, who is invisible.”
    Prose Style Rests on the Arrangement of Propositions in the Sentence
    There’s no way to predict all the differences and how these variations might actually hit a reader, but it seems safe to assume that a sentence mentioning God three times and the world once will have a slightly different impact on a reader than a sentence that mentions the world three times and God twice. And there surely must be some difference between a sentence that simply assumes God exists and one that chooses to make that claim explicitly.
    But let’s leave the theologically complicated territory of this particular sentence to see how E. B. White approached the same phenomenon in his afterword to William Strunk’s
Elements of Style
. White suggests to his readers, “If you doubt that style is something of a mystery, try rewriting a familiar sentence and see what happens.” The sentence he