Sentence Patterns

From the Obelisk in Buenos Aires, to a child holding an AIDS ribbon in India; from the Nelson Mandela Concert in South Africa to the panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in the US; from an anti-AIDS rally in Indonesia, to the symbol of AIDS awareness hanging in front of Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, World AIDS Day is marked across the globe. ( Buenos Aires Herald) I had been told of the ugliness of newborn children, of their red and wrinkled faces, their waxy covering, their emaciated limbs, their hairy cheeks, their piercing cries. (Margaret Drabble, The Millstone) From London's Olympic Cauldron to Australia's gruesome anti-smoking campaign, take a look at some of the most innovative designs from around the world, on display at the Design Museum in London from 20 March. The winner will be announced on 17 April. (The Guardian. March, 2013)

After 40 years adorning lunch boxes, baseball hats and T-shirts, bobbing as a giant inflatable above New Yorks Macys Thanksgiving Day parade and punning his way through 362 much-syndicated, minimally-animated, breakneck cartoon TV capers, the Moose that placed Jay Ward Productions on the map in 1959 finally makes his own big-time Hollywood screen debut. (review of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle) Repairmen came to repair the vacuum elevators in houses, to fix fluttering television sets or hammer upon stubborn food-delivery tubes. (R. Bradburys Zero Hour) That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all. (M. Cunningham, The Hours) Lester Herrick continued working, arranging heaps of notes and graphs in precise piles. Is by P. K. Dick) (Human

Others at once took up the cry, and the phrase was repeated, parrot-fashion, again and again, with an ever-growing volume of sound. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley Of a like size and general shape, the boys sat carving twig whistles, talking of olden or future times, content with having left their fingerprints on every movable object in Green Town during summer past and their footprints on every open path between here and the lake and there and the river since school began. (R.Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes) Oscar Wildes famous epigrams: Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood. Young men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and cannot. There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. All you need is love. Love is all you need. (The Beatles)

Cumulative sentence By Richard Nordquist, About.com Guide Definition: An independent clause followed by a series of subordinate constructions (phrases or clauses) that gather details about a person, place, event, or idea. Examples and Observations:

"I write this at a wide desk in a pine shed as I always do these recent years, in this life I pray will last, while the summer sun closes the sky to Orion and to all the other winter stars over my roof." (Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, 1987)

"He dipped his hands in the bichloride solution and shook them--a quick shake, fingers down, like the fingers of a pianist above the keys." (Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, 1925)

"The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves." (Joan Didion, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream." Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)

"Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine." (Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm. Harper & Row, 1977)

"The unwieldy provision carts, draught horses, and heavily armed knights kept the advance down to nine miles a day, the huge horde moving in three parallel columns, cutting broad highways of litter and devastation through an already abandoned countryside, many of the adventurers now traveling on foot, having sold their horses for bread or having slaughtered them for meat." (John Gardner, Life and Times of Chaucer. Alfred A. Knopf, 1977)

The cumulative sentence is particularly good for setting a scene or for panning, as with a camera, a place or critical moment, a journey or a remembered life, in a way not dissimilar to the run-on.

Cumulative Sentences in "The Falls" by George Saunders

By Richard Nordquist. About.com Guide George Saunders "I like style," George Saunders once told an interviewer. "I like to sound odd and, hopefully, unique." In the following two paragraphs from his short story "The Falls," Saunders achieves that distinction through cumulative sentences. In both the first paragraph (which is one long sentence) and the final sentence in paragraph two, he starts out with a simple statement and then accumulates details that serve to amplify, qualify, and describe what has come before. from "The Falls" by George Saunders -The school sat among maples on a hillside that sloped down to the wide Taganac River, which narrowed and picked up speed and crashed over Bryce Falls a mile downstream near Morse's small rental house, his embarrassingly small rental house, actually, which nevertheless was the best he could do and for which he knew he should be grateful although at times he wasn't a bit grateful and wondered where he'd gone wrong, although at other times he was quite pleased with the crooked little blue shack covered with peeling lead paint and felt great pity for the poor stiffs renting hazardous shitholes even smaller than his hazardous shithole, which was how he felt now as he came down into the bright sunlight and continued his pleasant walk home along the green river lined with expensive mansions whose owners he deeply resented. -Morse was tall and thin and as gray and sepulchral as a church about to be condemned. His pants were too short, and his face periodically broke into a tense, involuntary grin that quickly receded, as if he had just suffered a sharp pain. At work he was known to punctuate his conversations with brief wild laughs and gusts of inchoate enthusiasm and subsequent embarrassment, expressed by a sudden plunging of the hands into his pockets, after which he would yank his hands out of his pockets, too ashamed of his own shame to stand there merely grimacing for even an instant longer.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"The typical sentence of modern English, the kind we can best spend our efforts trying to write, is what we will call the cumulative sentence. The main or base clause, which may or may not have sentence modifiers like this before or within it, advances the discussion or the narrative. The other additions, placed after it, move backward, to modify the statement of the base clause or more often to explain it or add examples or details to it, so that the sentence has a flowing and ebbing movement, advancing to a new position and then pausing to consolidate it." (Francis Christensen and Bonniejean Christensen, A New Rhetoric. Harper & Row, 1976)

(retrieved from The Internet, May 12, 2012)