Reviews for Assignments in exposition

The average rating for Assignments in exposition based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-08-18 00:00:00 Cameron Hearne As far as style guides go, this is one of my favorites. I like how it stayed away from listing "rules" and instead talked about how different sentences create meaning differently. For about a month after I read this book it was really hard to write, because I wanted every sentence to be as perfect as the examples in this book. Here is the book review I wrote for one of my classes: “The streets were calm with Sunday.” With this quote from Aimee Bender, Virginia Tufte begins; she continues with over 700 additional examples of graceful, stylish sentences. But Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style is more than a catalogue of beautifully written writing samples. It is a well-written grammar guide, a book on style that embodies its subject, and a clear, descriptive analysis of the English sentence and its myriad forms. Articulating the complex and varied possibilities offered by the sentence is a difficult task. Traditional writing manuals and style guides (such as Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and Williams’ Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace) usually explain principles, lessons, or rules for students to follow, prescribing the way that good writing should be done. Tufte takes a different approach, one of description. She illustrates what sentences are made of, and how small changes in word order can have a huge impact on not only style, but meaning as well. Tufte gives her purpose in the book’s closing passages when she states: “Artful Sentences shows specific skills, widely applicable, that a writer can learn. It offers models that can be imitated, organizing them in a way that makes them accessible and comprehensive” (272). What is unique about the models, or examples, it contains, is their diversity. They are taken from every written discipline. Poetry is paired with technical writing, and science fiction with art criticism. Readers find themselves faced with Joan Baez, Virginia Woolf, Bill Clinton, Timothy Ferris, and many, many others. Moreover, her range and variety of contributors is a parallel to her range and variety of sentence types and constructions. Although she begins with the simple sentence, she moves through compound, complex, and compound complex sentences quickly, describing the sentence parts and how they can be used. Her descriptions are clear and well organized, her own sentences often competing with her examples in artfulness. And even as she uses advanced terms that may be unknown to the beginning writing student, she explains and defines them. Terms such as parataxis, synecdoche, as well as the elusive wysiwyg clause (what you see is what you get), are defined for readers who may not yet be familiar with them. The vocabulary required to understand this book may seem daunting to a student, and may be too much for a beginning writer to take in. But Tufte makes it easier on them by defining many difficult terms, and an observant and patient reader can learn much. Vocabulary acquisition is only one of the benefits this book offers students. Just as she claims, Tufte also gives the reader the valuable skills and models to follow. And also important, she offers the student a flexible and optimistic view of the possibilities sentences offer. Early on in the book she writes: “our language is richly flexible, responsive to innovative molding by skilled hands” (109). Tufte expands on this idea in her closing lines: “Forms that seem limited, and even limiting, in fact offer a range of opportunities to a writer in command of them—and one who knows how to transgress against them—to achieve undreamed of effectiveness, grace, and versatility” (272). This optimistic view of the flexibility language provides for us is a liberating one. It gives the reader a sense of excitement and is a great antidote to the pessimistic, rule-bound, feeling that traditional grammar study can present. Tufte truly illustrates the infinite capacity to create sentences form finite means. And in looking at hundreds (even approaching thousands) of types of sentences, she frees students from feeling bound to particular constructions, offering them freedom and autonomy. This creation of autonomy through mastery of the sentence is similar to the know-the-rules-before-you-can-break-the-rules attitude of other style guides. The difference is her almost complete absence of instruction, or “rules” that students should know before they break them. She describes examples to follow, but only rarely does she give set rules. Placing the focus on style and flexibility instead of rules provides tutors in the Writing Center with an excellent model for non-directive tutoring. Often the rules of grammar and syntax seem very prescriptive and directive. But by treating each sentence as a flexible and open piece of language that can be molded to suit the writer’s needs, the tutor can both show a student their syntactic, and consequently semantic options, while still leaving the student in complete control. An excellent example of this is given by Tufte on page 172. She first gives a model sentence from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, “Sensing a possible rival, I watched him warily, wondering who he was” (315). And after providing the example, Tufte describes the syntactic options that could be considered in revision: Sensing a possible rival, wondering who he was, I watched him warily, I, sensing a possible rival, wondering who he was, watched him warily. I watched him warily, sensing a possibly rival, wondering who he was. These options are each unique in both syntax and semantics, and by describing their individual attributes and effects, principles of style are easily learned and understood. The method of offering students variations of their own sample sentences, both as examples and options for revision, is very non-directive. It assures that students keep their autonomy, while also effectively communicating writing principles. By following the strategies that Tufte uses in teaching effective styles, tutors can teach students to write sound prose, that not only follows the traditional grammatical conventions, but is stylistically effective as well. Another method that can be beneficial for tutors is that of vocalizing the students prose. Tufte places an emphasis on the flow of writing, continually using word such as “rhythm” (108), and “energy” (106). She warns her readers against writing that might “create awkward unintended rhythms” (120), and devotes an entire chapter to “cohesion” between sentences, phrases and ideas. Vocalizing the written words is a common strategy adopted by tutors. Sometimes the tutor will read out loud to the student, sometimes the student to the tutor. If, while reading the piece, a tutor listens for rhythm, flow, cohesion and the general “sound”, this strategy could be even more effective. In her last chapter, “Syntactic Symbolism,” Tufte takes this strategy of vocalization to another level, citing examples of prose that itself embodies the ideas it describes. “Here syntax as style has moved beyond the arbitrary, the sufficient,” she says of her examples, “and is made so appropriate to content that, sharing the very qualities of the content, it is carried to that point where it seems not only right, but inevitable.” This concept, that of syntax symbolically representing the actions semantically described, is what Tufte sees as the crowning achievement of style. And she achieves it. Artful Sentences: Style as Syntax is what it sounds: artful.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-29 00:00:00 Donald Walker This is my favorite book on writing. It's not for beginners; Tufte won't waste your time explaining the parts of speech. There are a great many books out there that do this already. Instead, Tufte is an expert on how careful usage of different parts of speech gives different effect. But the joy in reading this book isn't simply from her well-curated samples from literature; it is also from Tufte's writing itself, which often subtly uses the devices she's talking about. For example, consider the introduction to The Noun as Fragment: A few years ago a staff member at a large university, cleaning out an old cabinet in the English department's offices, came across a neat black box. Inside were long-unused rubber stamps, twenty or more, apparently in the distant past employed to mark student papers. It is easy to visualize an overburdened writing teacher efficiently, firmly, perhaps even angrily, stamping with red ink the margins in stacks of student compositions: AWK. AGR. NOT CLR. CHOP. JARG. TRNS NDED. SPLT INF. COMM SPLS. RUN-ON. And what was probably regarded as the greatest of all sins, FRAG. I remember a teacher long ago who announced that any student paper containing a fragment automatically receiving an F, unless the student had labeled the fragment "intentional." See what she did there? She introduced the concept of sentence fragments using a sentence fragment. This book is full of little clever moments like this for the astute reader, and though I read this book cover-to-cover, I'm sure I haven't caught them all. While the examples she uses are fun to read, I think the way Tufte uses the various parts of speech in her own writing is as educational than the examples she gives.