RHETORICAL GRAMMAR

No sooner do I figure something out than I discover there’s already a book about it. In this case it’s an expensive textbook called “Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects,” Martha J. Kolin, mentioned yesterday on Jane Friedman’s blog, “There Are No Rules.” It’s a college text so maybe I’ll just set out to do a high school version, because THIS is what grammar is for. It is NOT meant to be a way for middle class A-students (usually girls) to put down the working classes (usually boys) by pointing out their grammar errors.

The REAL reason you do all those outlining exercises is to learn the structure of a sentence and what difference it makes to change it. When students say that grammar is pointless, they’re right, because all they learn is the definitions and the means -- never the end, the goal, the real playing field.

Consider. “The deer are browsing in the forest.” You can change the prepositional phrase to any location in the the sentence because it tells WHERE, which is an adverb question. (where, when, how, to what degree) So you could write: “In the forest the deer are browsing.” Or “The deer in the forest are browsing.” Or you could change the adverb preposition phrase to an adjective and say: “The forest deer are browsing.” If you were Yoda, you could say “Browsing are the forest deer,” but people would look at you funny and some people would think you were describing a kind of deer called “browsing.” Which you are, really.

Word order is a part of grammar that is never addressed in high school classes because the bulk of the class is still back there trying to find the prepositional phrases. In the years I taught high school, no class ever came along quickly enough to get to gerunds and participles except maybe in May when half the class was already missing. So how are they supposed to know that you can move them around, swap them in and out, but not without changing emphasis and possibly even changing meaning -- assuming the antecedents don’t get lost. This is an entirely different matter than rapping people on the knuckles because they said “ain’t.”

This is the part where you get to expand and contract your sentences like concertinas. This is crucial to clarity and the flow of the sense, to say nothing of the elegance of the words, the style. I once asked a professor of lyric poetry what “rhetoric” was and she basically told me it was what it was: indescribable. She COULD have said that it was about the choice and order of words in sentences and she COULD have said it was all governed by the clarity and purpose of the thinking it was trying to express, but she didn’t.

A writing workshop with Peter Matthiessen was the breakthrough for me. It was only a few days. We were chosen by submitting a sample and he liked what I submitted but he noted two memorable things which I’ve repeated to people (even readers of this blog) many times because they were powerful. So I’ll note them again here.

First, I had said that bison have purple mouths and tongues, like chow dogs, which is true. Peter said that choosing to bring chow dogs into the reader’s mind reduced the bison from their status as wild, powerful, free animals, because chow dogs are domestic. True or not, I needed some other comparison because every metaphor and comparison valorizes a new “brain realm,” as it were. I still haven’t found a worthy metaphor for the purple mouth of a bison, so I just say it’s purple. Let the reader’s mind go where it will: royalty, thunderclouds? This is why it’s so crucial to know the world so you can find powerful comparisons that people recognize.

Second, I had a sentence that was so convoluted and intricate that it just couldn’t be read. I forget why I wanted to put so many ideas into one sentence anyway, but Peter performed transformative surgery right there. A prepositional phrase became an adjective, a subordinate clause became an appositive, several items were brought into parallel by changing them to the same grammatical form, and then the whole thing made sense.

I used to deploy a little exercise where I printed on a work sheet a sentence that was fairly complex. Then under that sentence would be the same sentence with the task assigned to label the subjects and verbs, all the prepositional phrases, whether they were adjective (you can’t move them) or adverb (you CAN move them), the participles (same rules as prep phrases), the gerunds, the subordinate clauses.

Then under that sentence would be the same sentence with all the prep phrases or all the participles etc. knocked out -- just an underlined space. Their job was to fill the space with new versions. So it ended up with the three part worksheet problem looking something like this:

A: On June 26, 1975, in the late morning, two FBI agents drove onto Indian land near Oglala, South Dakota, a small village on the Pine Ridge Reservation. -- Peter Matthiessen, “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.”

B. (Prep phrase telling when - adv) (prep phrase telling when - adv) adj adj subj verb (prep phrase telling where - adv) (prep phrase telling where - adv) appositive (prep phrase telling where, but used to describe “village.”

C. “On June 23, 2010, during a thunderous afternoon, my lone self wrote in the back bedroom of my house in Valier, a town near the Blackfeet Reservation.”
It would be against the rules to add a direct object telling “what” I wrote because Matthiessen didn’t use a direct object. But I wouldn’t have to follow the original so closely. Here’s another version:
“In the early century, during the homesteader era, a married couple settled in a foothills coulee near the Rocky Mountains in Montana, a good place for raising livestock.”

By the time you have the whole class’s versions, it begins to get through what a grammar template is. Then you can talk about “when and where phrases” to begin a book (as this sentence begins “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse”) and how significant timing and location can be when telling a story. The converging crosshair forces that caused a tragic standoff were produced exactly by the when and where they happened. They give a mental picture that anchors the reader as well as hinting about what might happen.

Nothing happened in my back bedroom this afternoon. Sigh. In the early morning, after some strong coffee, my expectant self will drive to the south by eighty miles to Great Falls, my closest shopping town on the prairie. Anything might happen.