Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read (Great Courses, 1) Paperback – June 25, 2013

Brooks Landon's belief in long sentences goes against decades of teaching and advice. The dominant plain style prizes simplicity and clarity over elegance and eloquence. But Landon favors elaboration, and one type of long sentence—the cumulative, a detail-packed propulsive structure that enhances delivery of information, emotion, and rhythm. Such a sentence might impel you to savor it, or to stop and marvel at its maker’s skill.Because cumulatives begin with a simple base sentence, they’re easy to understand even as they add modifying phrases that lengthen them—to 40 words, 60, even100 and more. Here’s a fun one by Landon himself, from his How to Build Great Sentences, with the first five words being the base sentence:"He drove the car carefully, his shaggy hair whipped by the wind, his eyes hidden behind wraparound mirror shades, his mouth set in a grim smile, a .38 Police Special on the seat beside him, the corpse stuffed in the trunk".Landon teaches a popular class in prose style at the University of Iowa; with his focus on the sentence, and especially on the unique properties and benefits of its cumulative form, he’s among a handful of distinguished holdouts against the plain style. Their research into what genius writers and highly skilled professional wordsmiths often do began with an obscure 1946 essay, “The Craft of Writing,” by John Erskine. A novelist, pianist, and composer who taught at Columbia University, Erskine argued that it isn't actually the noun or the verb but the modifier that is "the essential part of any sentence."Rhetorician Francis Christensen took up Erskine's point—and changed writing instruction for a while in the 1960s and ’70s. Many high school students and college freshmen were taught to improve their writing by imitating masterful long sentences and by combining short sentences to make compound and complex ones. Although this worked, the movement crashed under an academic counter-attack in the 1980s. Landon touches on the reasons, and cites an elegiac essay, “The Erasure of the Sentence,” by Robert J. Connors. Connors essentially says that having students imitate wasn’t sexy enough to prevail in academe. Christensen’s methods, he says, were seen as mechanistic, “lore-based,” and lacking in supporting theory.The stunning irony, to any practitioner reading about this academic dispute, is that writers, including literary artists, have always learned by imitation. In writing classes, and certainly in creative writing workshops, the precocious stars are those who, having fallen in love with words, sentences, and stories long before, have already spent years informally studying them. In swimming through libraries, such writers absorbed structures and rhythms that make prose sing or pack a punch.Building Great Sentences concentrates such a process and makes learning overt. Chapter Five, “The Rhythm of Cumulative Syntax,” drills down into their structure. Upon finishing it, on Page 67, you might wonder how Landon will fill his book’s remaining pages—ten subsequent chapters. Indeed, you have the gist of his point and grasp the reason for his passion. But Landon continues: to teach more about cumulatives; to consider a few other sentence patterns; to offer further insights into balance, suspense, and the rhetorical effects of using two examples, or three, or four (and more).In other words, everything after Chapter Five is elaboration—and more nitty gritty for actual writers, who should draw near and study. The focus on one key pattern allows Landon to go deep without losing the serious student. And thankfully, Landon’s own prose is elegant and accessible. He uses as few grammatical terms as possible. This is a study of prose effects and how to achieve them—of rhetoric, that is, not grammar per se. He deftly cites other contemporary and past theorists, distilling their thought and giving motivated teachers and writers a way to locate and learn from them as well.For me, as a memoirist, a fascinating corollary aspect of Building Better Sentences is how cumulatives can help finesse persona. The writer's reflective persona is crucial in memoir because readers reflexively judge memoirists and the past selves they are portraying. Landon says cumulative sentences present a writer who's trying harder, lend themselves to reflection, and remind readers "of the creative mind that crafted that sentence." That’s "one of the functions of style: to remind us of the mind behind the sentences we read," he says. The macho plain style, in contrast, isn't inclined toward pursuit of deeper meaning and has a take-it-or-leave-it quality.I don’t entirely agree with Landon about plain style's flaws in fiction—that subject is very complex, and his two examples poorly illustrate his contention. Yet his overall notion, based on his preference for depth of inquiry, seems valid. I’m totally on board with his championing of the cumulative sentence and with its implications for nonfiction. Especially when blended with simple and compound sentences, cumulatives offer many options for rhythmic variety and emphasis.Landon treats Strunk and White's The Elements of Style kindly, even though it’s an exemplar of and an advocate for plain style. Aimed at beginning writers, remember, The Elements of Style is a fine and bracing brief for clarity of thought and expression. And professional writers do discover the beauty of simple declarative sentences, after all. They’re always looking for places to use them. They also, of course, make sentences of other lengths and patterns.Usually the results of learning to write by imitating great sentences are credited to individual talent. That obscures the way craft is actually acquired in a monkey-see, monkey-do process. For writers serious about improving, learning craft becomes steadily more focused and overt, as well as more self-prescribed and self-directed. After reading Building Great Sentences, I’ll write more and better cumulative sentences.Landon performs a valuable service for writers, teachers, and rhetoricians in explaining his obsession with cumulatives, spotlighting their relative simplicity, their flowing beauty, their subtle but steady reassurance about the writer, and their effectiveness in conveying rhythm, emotion, and information. Building Great Sentences is one of the top writing books in my library, and it’s the most useful study of the sentence I’ve ever read.

My personal thanks to Brooks Landon for this splendid piece of work. If you are looking for a quick fix to your writing this will be like buying a jumbo jet to take you to the grocery store. But if you are serious about writing, serious about mastering the art of crafting sentences, this is the book for you.I bought the course, "Building Great Sentences" from The Great Courses and on sale it cost about $79, what I consider one of the best bargains of my life. I chose it very carefully because I realized I had a chance to choose one of the best teachers on the subject, an option I didn't have for other subjects that I've struggled with in my life, wasting time and energy with half baked ideas, faulty methods and cheap tools. I decided that for those endeavors that were important to me I would opt for the best if there was a way to get it.At this time in my life I wanted to learn to write and I decided quite deliberately to choose the best teacher. What I learned in the course from Brooks Landon amazed me. I would listen, then stop and back up and listen to the same part of the course over and over, until what I thought I could never grasp started to become a part of me, expressions such as "cumulative syntax", "base clause", "free modifier", became mine. Yes, I have a long way to go, but at least I finally got underway.If you want to haywire a broken muffler to your car, buy a cheap pair of pliers and bailing wire and do a patch job. However, if you want to be a skilled automotive technician you will never feel good about your trade doing that kind of work, skilled technicians know the value of quality tools. Writing is hard work. The tools Brooks Landon gives you for writing are the best in the business.If you want something small and simple, try "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. If you really apply yourself to "The Elements of Style" and stick with it I promise you that you will never write anything worth reading because all you will know is how NOT to write. Many will disagree, I don't care what they think because I've wasted too much of my life with that book.As for Brooks Landon on writing: Take it a piece at a time. Mull it over. Go back to it. He completely changed my outlook on writing. After buying the $79 course, I bought his Kindle book so I could carry it with me.P.S. After writing the above review the thought occurred to me that those who learned about writing from Brooks Landon would find it difficult to adequately express themselves in a review. The simple reason being that Brooks was so eloquent and precise, how could we come up with the words and style that such a review deserves? The result being that we give no review at all because we feel inadequate. That is how I felt, and probably others feel the same way.Charles Risen

I wouldn't recommend this book for beginning writers, though. University course or not, I think this book could've been edited better. Grammar explanations come late or not at all...and aren't very good unless you're familiar with the terminology. Thankfully I didn't need them and, for the most part, they just got in the way.All in all, if you're ready for it, there's lots of useful information in here...about cumulative sentences.

I can't recall every reading a book that was so interesting, that I enjoyed so much, from which I learned so much, yet was so easy and such a pleasure to read. My enjoyment was marred only by his treatment of figures of speech, and by how badly he misquoted Winston Churchill, who said of the young pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few." He did not say anything as flat and banal as Professor Landon attributed to him: "Never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few." A few of the lengthy passages quoted to make a point are also rather tedious, but these flaws only prove that perfection can never be attained. But this book is as close as one can probably get, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wishes to transition from "professional/academic" prose to fiction.