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.In the firstexample, the phrase "for reference," by being made parallelto "for reading," does duty for the entire second clause.But at times parallelism improves nothing.Emphasis orrhythm often justifies a certain amount of repetition.Thus inthe second example above, the so-called "wordy" versionwould be preferable if the writer wished to stress "he mustwork."CHAPTER21The Sentence:(2) EmphasisIn speech we achieve emphasis in a variety of ways: by talkingloudly (or sometimes very softly); by speaking slowly, care-fully separating words that ordinarily we run together; byaltering our tone of voice or changing its timbre.We alsostress what we say by nonvocal means: a rigid, uncompro-mising posture; a clenched fist; a pointing finger; any of nu-merous other body attitudes, gestures, facial expressions.Writers can rely upon none of these signals.Yet they tooneed to be emphatic.What they must do, in effect, is to trans-late loudness, intonation, gesture, and so on, into writing.Equivalents are available.Some are merely visual symbols forthings we do when talking: much punctuation, for example,stands for pauses in speech.Other devices, while not un-known in speech, belong primarily to composition.Some ofthese we shall look at in this chapter.First, though, we need to distinguish two degrees of em-emphasis, which applies to the entire sentence,partial emphasis, which applies only to a word, or a groupof words, within the sentence.As an example of total em-phasis, consider these two statements:An old man sat in the corner.2.In the corner sat an old man.(2) EMPHASISSentence (1) is matter of fact, attaching no special importanceto what it tells us.Sentence (2), however, like a close-up in afilm, suggests that the fact is important.Now this distinctiondoes not mean that the second version is superior to the first:simply that it is more emphatic.Whether or not the emphasismakes it better depends on what the writer wants to say.By their nature strong sentences (that is, those having totalemphasis) cannot occur very often.Their effectiveness de-pends on their rarity.Writing in which every sentence is em-phatic, or even every other, is like having somebody shout atyou.Partial emphasis (emphasis within the sentence), however,is characteristic of all well-written sentences.Usually oneword (or phrase or clause) is more important than the others.Consider these two variations of the same statement:1.It suddenly began to rain.2.Suddenly, it began to rain.If we suppose that the writer wished to draw our attentionto "suddenly," sentence (2) is better.By moving it to theopening position and isolating it with a comma, the writergives the word far more weight than it has in sentence (1).Again there is no question of an absolute better or worse.Each version is well-suited to some purpose, ill-suited toothers.The Emphatic SentenceThere are a number of ways of stressing a statement in itstotality.AnnouncementAn announcement (in the sense it has here) is a preliminarystatement which tells the reader, "Watch out, here comessomething important":THE SENTENCEFinally, last point about the man: he is in trouble.Benjamin DeMottThe construction receiving the stress should be phrased con-cisely and vigorously and separated from the preceding an-nouncement by a colon or dash (though sometimes a commawill do).Anticipatory constructions, which we saw on page 141 asa potential source of deadwood, can function effectively as aform of announcement.They are low-key, reducing the in-troduction to little more than a pronoun (or there) + a verb:This was the consequence we feared.Evelyn Jonesinability of human beings to understand eachOther.Joy PackerThe FragmentA fragment is a construction which, like a sentence, beginswith a capital and ends with full-stop punctuation, but whichdoes not satisfy the traditional definition of a sentence.1 Whilethey are often serious grammatical faults, fragments can beused positively as a means of emphatic statement, drawingattention because of their difference:And that's why there's really a very simple answer to our originalquestion.What do baseball managers really do?Worry.Constantly.For a living.Leonard KoppettGoing off her diet, she gained back all the weight she had lost.Alsothe friends.1.See page for that definition.(2) EMPHASISThe Short SentenceShort sentences are inherently emphatic.They will seem es-pecially strong in the context of longer, more complicatedstatements.Often the contrast in length reinforces the con-trast in thought:As Thompson and the Transcript man had said, Vanzetti was nat-urally and quietly eloquent.So he was electrocuted.Phil strongAgain, it's an incontrovertible fact that, in the past, when contra-ceptive methods were unknown, women spent a much larger pro-portion of a much shorter life pregnant, or nursing infants whomthey had borne with little or no medical help.And don't believethat that's a natural, a healthy thing for human beings to do, justbecause animals do it.isn't.Elizabeth JanewayThe Imperative SentenceAt its simplest the imperative sentence is a command:Come here!Listen to me!Its distinguishing that it drops the sub-ject and begins with the verb, although some commands usea noun of address or an actual subject:John, come here!You listen to me!While commands are rare in composition, imperative sen-tences can be emphatic in other ways:Insist on yourself; never imitate.Ralph Waldo EmersonLet us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrownoff the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on therails.Henry David ThoreauTHE SENTENCEConsider, for example, those skulls on the monuments.Aldous HuxleyAside from being strong, imperative sentences also linkwriter and reader.Emerson does not say "men and womenmust insist on themselves"; he addresses you.Thoreau urgesyou to participate in a new way of life, and Huxley invitesyou to look with him at the statuary he is examining [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]