1. Two Ways to Imitate the Masters Adapted from Alison Jaenicke’s English 30 handout. More adaptation credit given on final slide.

2. Focusing on out-of the-ordinary syntax in sentence structure, imitating the styles of some masters, can help us bust out of our humdrum sentence styles and create an impact.

3. Let’s try two particular types of sentence: Periodic Sentence Loosely Constructed Sentence

4. One: Periodic Sentence A periodic sentence is one in which the reader must wait for the other shoe to drop; the structure of the sentence creates a sense of suspense. The subject of the sentence may be introduced toward its beginning, but the rest of the core sentence—which completes its meaning—is held in abeyance until near the end.

5. Additional details are added inside the basic sentence: The bald eagle, seen at the apex of flight, serenely perched on a tree, or boldly diving toward prey, is at once fierce, majestic, powerful, and independent. —Variation on U.S. Department of the Interior, "Bald Eagles of Wolflodge Bay"

6. Or the details may be presented in advance of all parts of the basic sentence: Slowly, all day through the forest, in the terrible heat, the soldiers marched. —Frank O'Hare, Sentencecraft.

7. A modern master of the periodic sentence, Martin Luther King, Jr., offers us examples in the fourteenth paragraph of "Letter from Birmingham Jail," which consists of a 300-plus-word periodic sentence: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

8. After numerous "when" clauses ("when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers . . . when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no hotel will accept you . . ."), King's sentence ends with the base sentence: ". . . then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait." The sentence made the intended audience wait almost 340 words for its purpose, which matches the 340 years before constitutional rights were given to all.

9. Writing Task #1: Compose a sentence as lengthy as a paragraph, a sentence that ends with a punch-line clause as if it were the punch line of a paragraph.

10. Two: Loosely Constructed Sentence In a loosely constructed sentence, the basic grammatical form and meaning is completed in the beginning of the sentence, and a string of details—qualifying phrases and clauses—follow. Here are two examples of the loosely constructed sentence created by college students: Youread about these dark and stormy nights in books, evenings when the streets are empty of cars and the skies are filled with clouds emitting loud bursts of thunder. The tall golden grassswayed lightly in the warm breeze, while the cold water of the creek glistened like a diamond from the rays of the bright sun.

11. Welsh poet Dylan Thomas's paragraph-length loosely constructed sentence from Quite Early One Morning begins with the independent clause: "I was born in a large Welsh town at the beginning of the Great War...." The rest of the lengthy sentence provides a list of events in a chatty manner. ...an ugly, lovely town (or so it was, and is, to me), crawling, sprawling by a long and splendid curving shore where truant boys and sandfield boys and old men from nowhere, beachcombed, idled, and paddled, watched the dock-bound ships or the ships steaming away to wonder and India, magic and China, countries bright with oranges and loud with lions; threw stones into the sea for the barking, outcast dogs; made castles and forts and harbours and race tracks in the sand; and on Saturday summer afternoons listened to the brass band, watched the Punch and Judy, or hung about on the fringes of the crowd to hear the fierce religious speakers who shouted at the sea, as though it were wicked and wrong to roll in and out like that, whitehorsed and full of fishes. (1954, 3)

12. Writing Task #2: Experiment with an over-the-top, paragraph-length loosely constructed sentence.

13. Reference Thomas, D. 1954. "Reminiscences of Childhood." In Quite Early One Morning. New York: New Directions Publishing Corp. Adapted from an article entitled, “Beyond Primer Prose: Two Ways to Imitate the Masters,” Romana Hillebrand, The Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 2 , 2004. (RomanaHillebrand is an instructor at Washington State University and a teacher-consultant with the Northwest Inland Writing Project, Idaho, where she serves on the advisory board.)