ClearTips: Stunning sentences

Cascades

The literati of the New York Times Book Review, seldom reined in by the short declarative sentence, often suffuse their reviews with colors, images, and sounds missing in most expository writing. So, to prove that not all your sentences need be short, here are some long ones.

So this language, with its echoes of nomads and emperors, pashas and ghazis, sultans and riches, and country matters, with its verbs of more than forty tenses, including the very useful one for innuendo that I wish we had, its oblique politenesses, this language with its own poetry of front- and back-rhyming vowels, this old tongue that contains within it all the past of Anatolia, is, for me, a shorthand.

The repetition of this language and the recast as this old tongue embrace, indeed contain and make more apparent, the cascade of with its echoes, with its verbs, its oblique politenesses, and with its own poetry.

Ulysses is the description of a single day, the sixteenth of June 1904, a Thursday, a day in the mingled and separate lives of a number of characters walking, riding, sitting, talking, dreaming, drinking, and going through a number of minor and major physiological and philosophical actions during this one day in Dublin and the early morning hours of the next day.

Whether naturalists or cowboys, whether bluegrass aristocrats or racetrack touts, whether distinguished academics or little girls gone horse-crazy, all readers with an interest in these large, remarkable animals are bound to be fascinated by Budiansky's knowledge, by his original thinking, by the authority with which he says what many other scientists lack the wisdom or the courage to say, and by the ferocity and tenderness of his voice.

He'd been just as deeply engaged by the challenge of rocks, for instance-scouring quarries throughout the country before settling on green chert from the California Gold Country for the boulders at the head of the stream, Montana Kinnesaw for the flanks of the watercourse, clean-cut slabs of Tennessee Blue Ridge sandstone for the footpaths, and carnelian granite from South Dakota for the staggered waterfall.

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