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Authors: Brooks Landon
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Tough-Guy Style: Predicative Sentences
Kernel sentences, distinguished by their lack of detail and explanation, can themselves create a kind of writing style. In fact, we might think of this style as the starting point for all other styles. Kernel sentences that simply posit a bare minimum of information offer the most basic form of âpredication.â Highly predicative prose isnât long on explanations. It has a kind of take-it-or-leave-it quality. This is macho-speak that bluntly posits information without reflecting upon it or elaborating it, and we find it exactly where we might expect to find it:
His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky. He had a long, heavy beard, and his hair was hanging down over his ears to his neck, and he had a hand out trying to thumb a ride from a car that was stopped at the pump.
This is how David Morrell began his 1972 novel
First Blood
, and his famous protagonist shares his narratorâs preference for simple declarations. Later in the novel, when Rambo briefly considers surrendering to the authorities who are hunting him, he quickly dismisses the thought:
Then he would throw down his rifle and hold up his hands and yell that he was surrendering. The idea revolted him. He couldnât let himself merely stand and wait for them. Heâd never done it before. It was disgusting.
We refer to these short, simple sentences and simple compound sentences as being predicative, and they are characteristic of the style Walker Gibson calls âtoughââa style frequently associated with some of Ernest Hemingwayâs best-known fiction. In his 1966 study âTough, Sweet & Stuffy: An Essay on Modern American Prose Styles,â Gibson closely examines the celebrated first paragraph of Hemingwayâs
Farewell to Arms
:
In the late summer of that year, we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river, there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
Gibson explains this highly predicative style is tough because its speaker, Frederic Henry, Hemingwayâs protagonist, says only what he could see or directly experience during a limited period of time, linking observations primarily with conjunctions, stating information without processing it. This predicative style is very effective when creating tough-guy characters, men and women who act, but donât think much about what they do. Itâs a style that Will Strunk would be hard-pressed to criticize, although I doubt he ever wanted any of his students to write exactly this way.
Needless to say, the strongly predicative style is not one Iâll be advocating for effective writing, unless you want to write tough-guy narratives. The highly predicative style seems to me to introduce the reader to a mind that is amazingly unreflective, almost anesthetized, or so focused on one purpose that it simply refuses to think about anything else or consider alternate points of view. That mindset is great for Rambo, but I donât think thatâs the mind we most want to introduce to our readers, unless our goal is to intimidate them. Accordingly, my approach to writing is more concerned with how we move beyond a highly predicative style.
Beyond Tough-Guy Style: Connective, Subordinative, and Adjectival Sentences
Once we have a kernel sentence of any length, there are threeâand only
Tough-Guy Style: Predicative Sentences
Kernel sentences, distinguished by their lack of detail and explanation, can themselves create a kind of writing style. In fact, we might think of this style as the starting point for all other styles. Kernel sentences that simply posit a bare minimum of information offer the most basic form of âpredication.â Highly predicative prose isnât long on explanations. It has a kind of take-it-or-leave-it quality. This is macho-speak that bluntly posits information without reflecting upon it or elaborating it, and we find it exactly where we might expect to find it:
His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky. He had a long, heavy beard, and his hair was hanging down over his ears to his neck, and he had a hand out trying to thumb a ride from a car that was stopped at the pump.
This is how David Morrell began his 1972 novel
First Blood
, and his famous protagonist shares his narratorâs preference for simple declarations. Later in the novel, when Rambo briefly considers surrendering to the authorities who are hunting him, he quickly dismisses the thought:
Then he would throw down his rifle and hold up his hands and yell that he was surrendering. The idea revolted him. He couldnât let himself merely stand and wait for them. Heâd never done it before. It was disgusting.
We refer to these short, simple sentences and simple compound sentences as being predicative, and they are characteristic of the style Walker Gibson calls âtoughââa style frequently associated with some of Ernest Hemingwayâs best-known fiction. In his 1966 study âTough, Sweet & Stuffy: An Essay on Modern American Prose Styles,â Gibson closely examines the celebrated first paragraph of Hemingwayâs
Farewell to Arms
:
In the late summer of that year, we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river, there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
Gibson explains this highly predicative style is tough because its speaker, Frederic Henry, Hemingwayâs protagonist, says only what he could see or directly experience during a limited period of time, linking observations primarily with conjunctions, stating information without processing it. This predicative style is very effective when creating tough-guy characters, men and women who act, but donât think much about what they do. Itâs a style that Will Strunk would be hard-pressed to criticize, although I doubt he ever wanted any of his students to write exactly this way.
Needless to say, the strongly predicative style is not one Iâll be advocating for effective writing, unless you want to write tough-guy narratives. The highly predicative style seems to me to introduce the reader to a mind that is amazingly unreflective, almost anesthetized, or so focused on one purpose that it simply refuses to think about anything else or consider alternate points of view. That mindset is great for Rambo, but I donât think thatâs the mind we most want to introduce to our readers, unless our goal is to intimidate them. Accordingly, my approach to writing is more concerned with how we move beyond a highly predicative style.
Beyond Tough-Guy Style: Connective, Subordinative, and Adjectival Sentences
Once we have a kernel sentence of any length, there are threeâand only
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