The session revolves around syntax of suspense and creation of suspensive sentences. We explore the notion of phatic expressions and move on to cover delay tactics in writing suspensive texts.

1. Advanced Writing
Session Five
A Course By Nima Yousefi

2. Concepts to cover this session
Suspensiveness
Techniques to Create Suspense
Phatic Expressions

3. Sentences that complete the basic pattern of subject and predicate
early on, keeping subject and verb near the beginning of the
sentence and keeping subject and verb close together
Loose Sentences

4. delaying its main clause until the very end
splitting the subject from the verb with qualifying material
using any construction that refines, sharpens, or adds to
initial information before putting it to final use
A sentence is termed periodic if it suspends
completion of its message:

5. "Those who roused the people to resistance, who
directed their measures through a long series of eventful
years, who formed, out of the most unpromising
materials, the finest army that Europe had ever seen,
who trampled down King, Church, and Aristocracy, who,
in the short intervals of domestic sedition and rebellion,
made the name of England terrible to every nation on the
face of the earth, were no vulgar fanatics."
- The Puritans By Thomas Babington Macaulay

6. "We can reason that the periodic style, like the noun style shows thought to
be static, organized into its component parts and then flash-frozen; the
running style, like the verb style, shows behavior still in progress, happening
in the present, not the past. The contrast often proves a fruitful one but it
ought not to lead us to ignore the powerful internal dynamics the period
can generate. If you add enough internal qualifications and parenthetical
interruptions, it turns into a running style.

7. Three Reasons for Employing Suspensive Syntax
1. Varying your predominantly loose style and emphasizing
your more important ideas
2. Putting the important ideas at the end of the sentence
3. Sustaining interest in a long sentence

8. In linguistics, a phatic expression is communication which serves a social
function such as small talk and social pleasantries that don't seek or offer
any information of value.
For example, greetings such as "hello" and "how are you?" are phatic
expressions.
Phatic Expression

9. Phatic Connectors
To be honest
Let's face it
Just between us
If truth be known
If you must know
If you get right down to it
If I may call it that
I can't help but wonder
To my way of thinking
It seems to me
Shall we say

10. Sentence Openers
Interrupters
Signpost Important Information or Claims
Clinch a Conclusion
Certify, Undermine, or Decertify Content
Uses of Phatic Phrases

11. An inverted cumulative works periodically, forestalling the base clause by a number of
modifying levels, keeping the distinctive cumulative rhythm, but putting it to suspensive effect.
His eyes weary from the road, his clothes tattered and dusty, his beard long
and unkempt, looking as if not only insects but small animals might be nesting
within its scraggly strands, Robert Coover's Wayfarer, the enigmatic
protagonist of one of the mini-narratives in "Seven Exemplary Fictions," is
hardly a character designed to attract our sympathy.
Five Delaying Tactics

12. "A verb has a hard enough time of it in this world when it is all together. It's
downright inhuman to split it up. But that's what those Germans do. They take
part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it
and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they
just shovel in German."
Completion of the base clause can also be delayed, by interposing modifying or qualifying
material between the subject and the verb of the sentence, a splitting tactic that runs the risk
of losing or alienating the reader, easily the least controlled or focused periodic form.
Five Delaying Tactics

13. Initial qualifying constructions lead to more complicated periodic structures, presenting
information that becomes complete—safe to accept as final-only when joined with or
reassessed in light of information in the base clause, a process signaled by opening words such
as "although," "even," or "if."
If it can be proved that UFOs exist, and if it is revealed that the U.S. government
has indeed hidden evidence of extraterrestrial visitors, and even if it turns out
that Bigfoot and Elvis do not live outside its lurid pages, the contribution of the
Weekly World News to the history of journalism may have to be reassessed.
Five Delaying Tactics

14. An extended subject produces similar results, initially offering an infinitive or relative clause,
bringing the sentence into focus only when it becomes clear that what at first may have looked
like a complete sentence is actually no more than the subject of a much longer sentence.
"To come all this way, to arrive after dark, to find the village completely
abandoned, Tarzan nowhere in sight, and the banana trees stripped bare
left Cheetah feeling completely nonplussed."
- Carl Klaus
Five Delaying Tactics

15. The sentence whose message is interrupted by a colon or a semicolon, but inexorably deflating,
inverting, or otherwise recasting that message by the one that follows the colon or semi-colon,
often waiting until the last word of the second clause to spring the sentence's rhetorical trap.
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent
virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
- Winston Churchill
Five Delaying Tactics

16. "Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan
which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let
future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is
actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood
any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise
and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests,
James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the
illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed
the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly
bliss."
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

17. Take Away Lessons
Suspensiveness
Techniques to Create Suspense

18. ― Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
“Write quickly and you will never write well;
write well, and you will soon write quickly.”