27 Invigorating Your Style

Nearly all of the chapters in parts 2 and 3 of this book aim to help you
improve your style: to write not just correctly but cogently, to shape your
sentences with coordination and subordination, to enhance them with
parallel structure, to enrich them with modifiers, and to perfect them
with well-chosen words. In this chapter, we focus specifically on what you
can do to invigorate your style.
Good writing exudes vitality. It not only sidesteps awkwardness,
obscurity, and grammatical error; it also expresses a mind continually at
work, a mind seeking, discovering, wondering, prodding, provoking,
asserting. Whatever else it does, good writing keeps the reader awake.
Unfortunately, much of what gets written seems designed to put read-
ers to sleep. In most college writing you are expected to sound thoughtful
and judicious, but no reader wants you to sound dull. To enliven your
writing on any subject, here are five specific things you can do.

27.1 VARY YOUR SENTENCES

Take a hard look at one of your paragraphs—or at a whole essay. Do all of

your sentences sound about the same? If most are short and simple, com-
bine some of them to make longer ones. If most are lengthened out with
modifiers and dependent clauses, break some of them up. Be bold. Be sur-
prising. Use a short sentence to set off a long one, a simple structure to set
off a complicated one. Though you need some consistency in order to keep
the reader with you (did you notice that all of our last five sentences are
imperatives?), you can and should spurn the monotony of assembly-line
sentences.
To see what you can do with a variety of sentences, consider this
example:

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 Invigorating Your Style vary 27.1
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand-
daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty
years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing
well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a
potential slave said “On the line!” The Reconstruction said “Get set!”; and
the generation before said “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not
halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for
civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and
worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.
—Zora Neale Hurston

Among the many things that invigorate the style of this passage is the variety
of sentence types that Hurston uses—simple, compound, complex, and
compound with a subordinate clause:
SIMPLE : It fails to register depression with me.
Slavery is sixty years in the past.

COMPOUND : The operation was successful and the patient is doing well,
thank you.
I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to
look behind and weep.

COMPLEX : Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the

granddaughter of slaves.
It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through
my ancestors for it.

COMPOUND WITH SUBORDINATE CLAUSE : Slavery is the price that I paid for
civilization, and the choice was not with me.

Now consider this passage:

This looking business is risky. Once I stood on nearby Purgatory
Mountain, watching through binoculars the great autumn hawk migra-
tion below, until I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawks on
a vertical migration of my own. I was used to binoculars, but not, appar-
ently, to balancing on humped rocks while looking through them. I
reeled.
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Dillard varies both the structure and the length of her sentences. She
moves from five to thirty-five words, then down to just two at the end.
When a very short sentence follows one or more long ones, it can strike
like a dart.

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27.3 use Invigorating Your Style

27.2 USE VERBS OF ACTION INSTEAD OF BE

Verbs of action show the subject not just being something but doing some-
thing. At times, of course, you need to say what your subject is or was or
has been, and these words can speak strongly when used to express equality
or identity, as in Beauty is truth. But verbs of action can often replace verbs
of being:
won
£ Sheila was the winner of the nomination.
^
shocked
£ Frederick’s desire to learn reading would have been a shock to other
^
slaveholders.

£ Mr. Ault believed that learning would be the ruin of Frederick as a

slave.

27.3 USE THE ACTIVE VOICE MORE OFTEN

THAN THE PASSIVE

Use the active voice as much as possible. Verbs that tell of a subject acting
usually express more vitality than verbs that tell of a subject acted upon:
PASSIVE : After a big hole was dug and sprinkled with fertilizer, the tree
was planted.

ACTIVE : After digging a big hole and sprinkling it with fertilizer, I planted
the tree.

While some sentences work better in the passive voice, overuse of the pas-
sive can paralyze your writing. This is a problem to be seriously considered by
anyone who has ever been asked to write an essay in which a subject of some
sort is to be analyzed, to be explained, or to be commented upon by him or her.
That sentence shows what overuse of the passive will do to your sentences:
it will make them wordy, stagnant, boring, dead. Whenever you start to
use the passive, ask yourself whether the sentence might sound better in
the active. Often it will. (For a full discussion of the active and passive
voice, see chapter 24.)

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 Invigorating Your Style cut 27.5

27.4 ASK QUESTIONS

Break the forward march of your statements with an occasional question:

He falls back upon the bed awkwardly. His stumps, unweighted by

legs and feet, rise in the air, presenting themselves. I unwrap the bandages
from the stumps, and begin to cut away the black scabs and the dead,
glazed fat with scissors and forceps. A shard of white bone comes loose. I
pick it away. I wash the wounds with disinfectant and redress the stumps.
All this while, he does not speak. What is he thinking behind those lids
that do not blink? Is he remembering a time when he was whole? Does he
dream of feet?
—Richard Selzer, “The Discus Thrower”

Questions like these can draw the reader into the very heart of your sub-
ject. And questions can do more than advertise your curiosity. They can
also voice your conviction. In conversation you sometimes ask a question
that assumes a particular answer—don’t you? Such a question is called
rhetorical, and you can use it in writing as well as in speech. It will chal-
lenge your readers, prompting them either to agree with you or to explain
to themselves why they do not. And why shouldn’t you challenge your
readers now and then?

27.5 CUT ANY WORDS YOU DON’T NEED

Cut out all needless repetition and strive to be concise (see 8.13):

£ During their tour of Ottawa, they saw the Parliament buildings, and

they saw the National Art Center.

He decided because he wanted
£ The reason for his decision to make a visit to Spain was his desire to see
^ ^
a bullfight.
He went
£ [or] The reason for his decision to make a visit to Spain was his desire to
^
see a bullfight.

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27.5 cut Invigorating Your Style

IN BRIEF Invigorating Your Style

£ Vary the length and structure of your sentences:
I was used to binoculars but not, apparently, to balancing on humped
rocks while looking through them. I reeled.
—Annie Dillard

£ Use verbs of action instead of be:

Sheila won the nomination.

£ Use the active voice as much as possible.

£ Ask questions:
What on earth is our common goal? How did we ever get mixed up
in a place like this?
—Lewis Thomas

£ Cut unneeded words:

He went
The reason for his decision to make a visit to Spain was his desire to
^
see a bullfight.

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