Grammar as Rhetoric and Style Cumulative Periodic and

Grammar as Rhetoric and Style Cumulative, Periodic, and Inverted Sentences

Simple Sentence Most of the time, writers of English use the following standard sentence patterns: • Subject/Verb: I cried. • Subject/Verb/Subject Complement: Even the streams were now lifeless. • Subject/Verb/Direct Object: We believed her.

Making Longer Sentences Writers often coordinate two or more of the standard sentence patterns or subordinate one sentence pattern to another. Coordinating Patterns: Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and may real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. Subordinating One Pattern to Another: And when they arrived on the edge of Mercury, they carried all the butterflies of a summer day in their wombs.

The problem… The downside to sticking with standard sentence patterns, coordinating them, or subordinating them is that too many standard sentences in a row become monotonous. So… • Writers break out of the standard patterns now and then by using a more unusual pattern, such as the cumulative, periodic, or inverted sentence. • When using one of these sentence patterns, you call attention to that sentences. • It contrasts significantly with the pattern of the sentences surrounding it. • Unusual sentence patterns can emphasize a point, control sentence rhythm, increase tension, or create dramatic impact. • It helps you avoid monotony in your writing.

Cumulative Sentence The cumulative (or loose) sentence begins with a standard sentence pattern and adds multiple details after it. The details can take the form of subordinate clauses or different kinds of phrases. These details accumulate, or pile up—hence, the name cumulative. EXAMPLES: The women moved through the streets as winged messengers, twirling around each other in slow motion, peeking inside homes and watching the easy sleep of men and women. We have grown into everywhere, spreading like a new growth over the entire surface, touching and affecting every other kind of life, incorporating ourselves.

Periodic Sentence The periodic sentence begins with multiple details and holds off a standard sentence pattern—or at least its predicate—until the end. EXAMPLE Human beings, large terrestrial metazoans, fired by energy from microbial symbionts lodged in their cells, instructed by tapes of nucleic acid stretching back to the earliest live membranes, informed by neurons essentially the same as all the other neurons on earth, sharing structures with mastodons and lichens, living off the sun, are now in charge, running the place, for better or worse.

Inverted Sentence A standard sentence has the subject come before the verb. A writer may choose to invert the sentence, however, by placing the verb before the subject. EXAMPLE In the woods, is perpetual youth. • Slows the reader down because it is simply more difficult to comprehend inverted word order.

Identify each of the following sentences as periodic, cumulative, or inverted, and discuss the impact of using that pattern. Please note that each sentence is a direct quotation. LET’S PRACTICE!

1. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. ANSWER: Cumulative 2. Among them are many that are used in man’s war against nature. ANSWER: Inverted 3. I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with emotions which an angel might share. ANSWER: Cumulative 4. Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. ANSWER: Periodic

5. When a noble act is done, --perchance in a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at them once in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades, are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed? ANSWER: Periodic 6. Regret maybe you’ll consider. ANSWER: Inverted 7. How to get power? is what they’re thinking. ANSWER: Inverted 8. What’s at stake as they busy themselves are your tax dollars and mine, and ultimately our freedom too. ANSWER: Periodic

Resources Shea, Renee, Lawrence Scanlon, and Robin Dissin Aufses. The Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric, 2 nd ed. , Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013.