Unbalancing the Sentence

There’s no perfect place to talk about grammar, so I thought I’d talk about it on the train.

In your average sentence, nouns and verbs do equal work in tandem with each other. But sometimes a writer deliberately unbalances a sentence for rhetorical effect. If you load up on verbs or adverbs, that’s called verb style. If you load up on nouns and adjectives, that’s called nominal style. I don’t think of these styles as a binary, but as a continuum.

High-tech diagram.

For me the exciting question is: How does a chosen style reinforce or modulate the content? Another way of saying this is: sentences tell stories. Is your style helping the story or working against it?

I say “story” but that’s a shorthand. This works for argumentative prose, too.

Sometimes a sentence is “well-written” and “grammatical,” but it doesn’t evoke the feeling you want to evoke in a reader. That’s where understanding noun and verb style can help you. First stop on the grammar train, check the balance between noun and verb!

I drew my sample sentences (see video) from Gloria Anzaldúa (1942 –2004). In addition to her beautiful book Bordlerands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa co-edited the groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color. She called herself a “chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist.”

Here is Gloria Anzaldúa rocking verbal style:

“And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down?”

And from the same piece, here she is, exploiting nominal style to beautiful effect:

“Stubborn, persevering, impenetrable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos, will remain.”

It would be foolish to say, verbal style is “better” than nominal style. Though writing teachers sometimes do say that. For example: “Using wimpy verbs can make your writing appear uninteresting and lackluster.”) Ideally you glide up and down the continuum, shifting where the story requires it.

Small Exercises for the active learners in the house. You know who you are.

1: Pull out a piece of your writing; pick a sentence; count the nouns and the verbs. Check to see if the sentence is in balance—or should be out of balance.

2: Choose a verb and convert it into a noun. Choose a noun and convert it into a verb. (“Choose” converts to “choice.” “Convert” converts to “conversion.)

3: See if you can make a noun behave like a verb, or a verb behave like a noun. Linguists call this conversion or Functional Shift. I call it fun.

Taming of the Shrew: “I warrant him, Petruchio is Kated.”

King Lear: “He childed as I fathered.”

Timon of Athens: “Come, sermon me no further.”

Calvin and Hobbes:

Deep respect for those who skim exercises, knowing they’ll never do them. I just close-read Eric Kim’s Orzotta Alla Carbonara recipe, but will I ever cook it? No. I do love Kim’s Lemon-Turmeric Crinkle Cookies, and the video where he shows you how to bake them.

(Insanely delicious! Like a cross between a lemon cookie and a powdered sugar donut.)

Thanks for tuning in! Let me know if you have questions.