Sin And Syntax

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Constance Hale. Sin and Syntax. Broadway Books. 1999. xix +289 pages. $14.95. In her snazzy and helpful book Sin and Syntax, author Constance Hale masters the seemingly impossible feat of making grammar easy, and almost fun. She starts with the basics, and builds from there. Not surprisingly, the first section of the book is titled “Words,” and is about just what it says: words. Word selection is vital to her premise, and she advises the reader to “be simple, but go deep.” Uses vivid examples of just what she means to make her point as she guides the reader into an easy and enjoyable read. Hale’s lessons continue past words to the basic parts of a sentence, and then progress to how to stitch those parts into the sentence itself. Hale emphasizes that the sentence is more than just the sum of its parts. The trick is to craft from the parts a whole that conveys as much in how it reads and feels as in what it says. There must be a scheme for generating even the simplest sentence. Hale explains that “We don’t want them (sentences) to stay the same, day after day.” Straightforward and spare, or wordy and expansive, each sentence must have a purpose and a place. The third section of Sin and Syntax is “Music.” Here Hale is concerned with more than sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation. She is grasping for the melody of words, the feelings writing can engender, and the atmosphere prose can create. Hale explains that “prose can be more than just ordered output. It can also be art, possessing all the qualities we associate with its more highfalutin cousin, poetry. Prose can have voice, lyricism, melody, and rhythm.” She explains how to order the notes sounded by the individual words and sentences to compose the melody of the writing itself. Any student writer from middle school on is taught some version of the same set of grammar

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