There is something going on with the way the sentences are put together, right? Where is that happening? What does that do to you as a reader? What does it make you feel and think? Why?
Let’s talk about sentence types:
Sentence Types
The four types of sentences, based on structure, are (more at Purdue OWL with examples):
- Simple
- Compound
- Complex
- Compound-Complex
- [Also, the fragment–which is completely legitimate to use, especially to emphasize something since readers often don’t expect fragments]
Varying your sentence types can create a different rhythm. Dependent clauses or phrases, for instance, can interrupt a sentence in ways that a simple sentence only made up of an independent clause cannot.
Compare:
-He went to school.
-He went, after he dropped off library books at the library, to school.
Sentence Types and Proximity
Varying sentence types can draw ideas both closer together and further apart, which can have rhetorical effects:
Very Far: It was a rough day for Melissa. She had to cover a second shift for her friend at work. And now she was stranded. Because her car broke down. Great.
Far: It was a rough day for Melissa. She had to cover a second shift for her friend at work. Plus, now she was stranded at work because her car broke down.
Close: It was a rough day for Melissa, especially since she had to cover a second shift for her friend at work. Plus, now she was stranded at work because her car broke down.
Very Close: It was a rough day for Melissa, especially since she had to cover a second shift for her friend at work; now she was stranded in her broken down car.
Using em-dashes, along with semicolons and colons, can utilize proximity for purposes of emphasis.
–Very close with greater pause for dependent clause: It was a rough day for Melissa–especially since she had to cover a second shift for her friend at work; now she was stranded in her broken down car.
–Very close with longer pause for rhetorical triplet: It was a rough day for Melissa: she had to cover a second shift for her friend, her car broke down, and now she is stranded.
This punctuation guide website is a wonderful resource.
Much of this, too, depends on position in the sentence. Generally, the ranking of position of emphasis in English is:
- End of Sentence
- Beginning of Sentence
- Middle of Sentence
Generally speaking, whatever you want to emphasize should come at the end of the sentence. If you want to de-emphasize something, bury it in the middle in a dependent clause or some other way.
Keeping an idea by itself is more likely to be emphasized, especially if you are engaging in a good variety of sentences (otherwise, if just a bunch of simple sentences, the monotone rhythm will lose the emphasis).
Sentence Type and Punctuation
What do these different sentence types do? What punctuation do you notice? What effect does that have?
The speeches given at the gala prior to Rob’s all mention equality, diversity, and community (Complex). All these are grand and amazing sounding ideas, as Joffe-Walt explains, but within the setting of the gala, they seem out of place (Compound Complex). She draws attention to the contrast by noting that the gala is full of wealthy white people and the venue is in an Italian Renaissance inspired palace (Compound Complex). To us, the paradox is obvious: the white and wealthy gala attendees are preaching about the importance of diversity when there is none to begin with at the gala (Compound). There is only one race and one economic group present (Simple). By doing this, Joffe-Walt has shown the podcast listeners that it’s possible that the gala attendees are not aware of and cannot understand how those who aren’t white and rich live (Complex). This gap in experiences between the white gala attendees and people of color establish that the decisions and ideas the white parents have may not be in the interest of the students of color (Complex).