Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style Paperback – January 1, 2006

Never realized how much I wanted a book like this. If you're looking for "inspiration," musings on the nature of creativity, touching reminiscences, or heartfelt words of encouragement, you'll find none of that here. This book is all business, nothing but technical analysis, model sentences followed by commentary of their grammatical structure and associated effects on the tone of the work. It's great. Rather than use cute stories and motivational phrases to try and get you in the "writing mood," it actually teaches you the skills to become a better writer. I laugh at the reviews complaining that the author uses big funny terms and looks at everything in a really technical way—it's called grammar. Turns out a solid understanding of the way our language works can really help with writing what you mean.It's like what you try to learn by reading all the great authors in the hopes of absorbing some glimmer of their style, but distilled. It almost feels like cheating on a book report by just reading the Sparknotes.And to be clear, Virginia Tufte was a professor of English at USC for 25 years. Her son (not husband!) was the famed scholar Edward Tufte, whose name you might be familiar with if you've ever studied data visualization. Both are VERY well regarded in their fields. So it especially annoyed me to read a rather sexist review insinuating that she was just "some woman" publishing on her husband's imprint, as if a woman couldn't possibly have any talent or skill of her own.The printing is also very high quality—crisp text and thick cream paper. Highly recommend.

"Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style" by Virginia Tufte is a book about sentence structure. I give the book a 5-star in admiration for Virginia Tufte's work on putting the book together. Tufte uses hundreds of examples throughout the book. She describes a kind of sentence structure (syntactic categories, as she calls it) and then gives examples from writings. I would like to give a quote from the book by Tufte to help anyone thinking about buying the book:Writing is difficult. Whether a writer’s sensitivities are informed by one or several languages, it is not easy to capture a unique perception or idea in poetry or prose. Professional writers, however, do the best they can in whatever circumstances they find themselves. That best is often eloquent and precise, artful but unpretentious enough to become a model for other writers.A critic who reports on a syntactic habit of a certain author’s style, or on some other verbal effect, by importing that very characteristic into her own style offers a nice sort of evidence for the conclusion of this chapter and the end of the book. One premise of this volume has been that syntax and style are reciprocal concerns—that it can make good sense, and help to make good prose, to think of syntax as style. The chapters have exhibited more than a thousand sentences on the assumption that good style is learned by emulation of authors who display it. As the examples show, although the syntactic means are relatively simple and few, the stylistic effects are countless.This is the nature, the great beauty of approaching the art of the sentence through syntactic categories along with prolific displays of the splendid sentences good writers achieve. "Artful Sentences" shows specific skills, widely applicable, that a writer can learn. It offers models that can be imitated, organizing them in a way that makes them accessible and comprehensive. Forms that seem limited, and even limiting, in fact offer a range of opportunities to a writer in command of them—and one who knows how to transgress against them—to achieve undreamed of effectiveness, grace, and versatility.

. . . you should have this book.

This is a writerly book for lovers of language used well. It dissects sentence composition with amazing detail and insight, beginning with short declarative sentences and working up to longer and more complex forms. It is not a grammar reference; it is a study in masterly wordcraft, aimed at those who already understand the tools of language and wish to learn to employ them effectively.Tufte classifies sentence types systematically, and demonstrates how each type contributes to the tone, rhythm, impact, and other aspects of the literary style of the written work. Every tiny variation is illustrated with well-chosen examples from works of quality. The collected content is an organized survey of sentence types and writing techniques, discussed and explained with expertise and sensitivity. She does not treat language as a grab-bag of specific tools, to be plugged into prose for particular effects; instead, she treats writing as a skillful art which can be approached deliberately and analyzed objectively, in ways that allow authors to achieve their own goals through purposeful application. The result is a painstaking study of the importance of sentence structure to the functioning of the sentence in the larger work - a technician's view of the workings of writing at the component level, written with an adept's finesse.This book is a must for anyone who writes and is dedicated to their writing-craft, or for anyone who reads and aspires to a true appreciation of what writing is. It is a treasure of scholarship done brilliantly and with feeling.

A little disappointing. The book is comprehensive in classifying and offering examples of various sentence structures, but it's very light on analysis of the actual rhetorical effect.Many of the examples are of questionable quality and it's not always clear whether they're being shown as successes or failures.Some additional explanation of what the sentence structure achieved (versus alternative configurations of the same sentence) would have been valuable.

Excellent book for the advanced creative writer.