Building Great Sentences Read Online Free

words” or “bunch of words” or “combination of words” or “number of words.” Or she might just have said, “Why should words be anything but a pleasure?” leaving out
sequence
altogether. But she chose the word
sequence
over a number of other possibilities, just as she chose to use the word
pleasure
over
gratification
,
satisfaction
,
joy
,
delight
, or any number of other words suggesting a positive experience.
    Any word we write is chosen from a list of synonyms or a list of words that are either more or less abstract. When I write “I got into my car,” for instance, I could use a more abstract word such as
vehicle
or
transportation
. I got in my vehicle. I got in my transportation. Or I could use a less abstract word such as
sedan
or
minivan
. I got in my sedan. I got in my minivan. Or I could choose an even less abstract, more precise word or term, such as
Ford
or
Ford Fusion
. “I got in my Ford Fusion.” You can imagine a vertical series of more abstract words above the word we choose, or more precise words below the word we choose. Semanticists refer to this paradigmatic axis as the “ladder of abstraction,” and it reminds us that one of the important variables in our writing is the degree of precision in our choice of the words we use.
    The other major choice we make when we write a sentence is the order in which we arrange the words we choose. For example, Stein could just as easily have made her question “Why should we get anything but pleasure from a sequence of words?” We might think of the order in which words appear in a sentence as choices made along that horizontal or syntagmatic axis we call syntax.
    Form Is Content; Style Is Meaning
    Now that we’ve identified the three main factors that determine the style and effectiveness of our writing—propositional content, word choice, and syntax—let’s go back to our sentence from Gertrude Stein one more time to see the most important assumption underlying this book: that
the same words in different order have different meanings
, or to put this another way, that
style is content.
    Most of us have been taught to think of style and meaning, or form and content, as two different things and, indeed, it is almost impossible to talk about language without resorting to this binary opposition. We think of content as the ideas or information our writing conveys, and we think of style as the way in which we present these ideas. Many aphorisms and metaphors have been used through the years to describe style, ranging from “Style is the man himself” to “Style is the dress of thought.” Most of these metaphors confuse our understanding of style as much as or more than they clarify it. If we have to use a metaphor to explain style, we might better think of the onion, which consists of numerous layers of onion we can peel away until there’s nothing left. The onion is its layers, and those layers don’t contain a core of “onionness,” but they are themselves the onion.
    Similarly, when we write a sentence, the way we choose to order its propositional content subtly affects that content so that the meaning changes ever so slightly with every vocabulary and syntactical choice we make. It’s probably safe to say that all of us can agree that the point of Stein’s “Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?” is that words should do more than just convey information, that language is itself an experience worth considering, quite apart from its reference. But do we really believe that “Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?” means exactly the same as:
    Why shouldn’t words in sequence always be a pleasure?
    Shouldn’t a sequence of words be always a pleasure?
    A sequence of words should always be a pleasure.
    We read these sentences differently. Each reflects different stylistic choices,