She had a decent education and an ear—the woman he loved, beyond love as she knew or imagined it, in his hometown, had an ear!
The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
With all the windows open this morning, I woke to the songs of birds. As I lay there, I thought: this is a beautiful way to wake up, and also: music is made by patterns. Over and over, they sang the same notes.
So all those teachers who told you not to repeat and to use your thesaurus, well, we’re turning our ear to the delight of pattern-making like Dillard’s sentence.
She repeats two words, love and ear, and the phrase “had an ear.” Repetition adds emphasis and renders the obsession of the character’s mind. The two words are yoked together, and implicitly, we understand that he loves her because she listens.
Instead of saying “she listens,” Dillard uses “ear.” Stylistically, she’s invoked synecdoche, in which a part of something is used to represent the whole. For example, “all hands on deck,” where “hands” refers to the entire crew. Here, the ear is part of the apparatus of listening. It’s easy to confuse synecdoche with metonymy, which is a word or phrase substituted for something closely associated with it. For example, “White House” for President. You don’t need to master the terms to introduce a strong, often original image and compress a lot of unstated emotion and information.
I love the way Dillard begins her right-branching sentence, starting in the realm of the conventional or expected: “She had a decent education.” The reader is comfortable; the reader has heard this before. And then comes “and an ear.” Now, the reader is alert because of this unexpected and unfamiliar detail. The reader leans in attentively.
After the em-dash, which creates speed and connection between the opening and what follows, Dillard uses a mid-branching sentence. She separates the subject “the woman” from the verb predicate “had an ear.” Not only does this create suspense and a build to the end, but there’s room to repeat the word “love.” Dillard uses polyptoton—the repetition of words derived from the same root or with different endings. She has “loved” and “love,” and the slight variation is interesting to the ear. We wake up again. Using anadiplosis--a word or phrase at or near the end of a clause is repeated at or near the beginning of the next clause--she amplifies “love” because the repetition is so close together.
Punctuation, too, is part of style. So now we need to look at the exclamation point. I love them! What an efficient way to convey excitement.
Your Turn
Open with a base clause, a subject and a verb. Now add a familiar detail about your subject. Then use synecdoche for your second, more surprising image.
Use an em dash and state the subject again, but not the verb. In this in-between space, can you use polyptoton? Anadiplosis?
End with your verb, which is a repetition of the verb used in the opening base clause.
How did it go?
What else do you see?
Thank you, subscriber, for sending me this sentence! In your reading travels, if you come across a sentence that you admire, love, or it fills you with delight, please send it to me! ninaschuyler@gmail.com
Swimming in Style!
We had a fantastic Zoom gathering on June 15th, with so much vivid, original, strong writing! We looked closely at the architecture of five sentences and then we leaped! Toward the end, everyone chose a sentence that excited them and ran further with it, unfurling the beginnings of a story.
This will be a monthly adventure. If you can’t make the day or time, I’ll send you the recording, along with the analysis of the sentences.
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About Me:
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007.
Please visit my website to find all my books: ninaschuyler.com, including my novel Afterword, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
In This Ravishing World:
I’m so happy that my short story collection, In This Ravishing World, will be published on July 2, 2024. The collection won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature.
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She had her brother’s love and a key—a girl crossing a threshold, a girl stepping into her own kitchen, her own blank space to fill.
The algorithm crunched numbers and a byte—this code we debugged, beyond debugging as we coded or imagined it, in our virtual sandbox, crunched a byte!