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Anthony Carhuayo anthonycarhuayo — ~Reprint from March 2006~ NONFICTION BOOK REVIEW © Jenn Sommersby Young ~ 2006-2011 SIN AND SYNTAX: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose by Constance Hale Pub. Broadway ISBN 0767903099 / 978-0767903097 2011 update: available for Kindle There are three absolutes for the reading writer upon his/her decision to ingest Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax: (1) Buy your own copy. Do not borrow the library’s edition, my friend, because you will not be able to resist the urge to dog-ear, highlight, scribble, or underline the imperatives dished out as canapés before the brandy. Wordsmiths rejoice and pedants repent, Hale lays out the rules and then rips wheelies all over them. (2) Read through the book once, allowing your pen to merely fondle the text, consenting to only sporadic gratification with the occasional “*” or “!” Savor the book. Force yourself to pay attention. Don’t be scared or intimidated by Hale’s genius. (Thank heavens there is SOMEONE who understands direct objects, participles, dangling whatzits and thingamajigs). And don’t get caught up on the sentence diagramming stuff or else you might scurry away in terror, leaving your poor pen unfulfilled and frustrated. (3) Read through a second time and take as many notes as possible before writer’s cramp tangles your fingers. Your pen will bask in the afterglow and might even buy you dinner. Adroitly constructing her tower block by block, Hale pours the foundation in the sections she calls Bones (a bit of a remedial in grammar school tedium) and Flesh (explaining the connection between the grammar and the prose). But if you snooze, you lose. Hale quickly moves past the snore-a-thon “sermonettes” and dives headlong into the power tools you need to fortify your writing, progressing ever onward and upward to the higher stratum that will house the plumbing and ventilation systems of colorful, imaginative prose. Hale is a stylistic seductress. The most delicious pieces of each chapter, Cardinal Sins and Carnal Pleasures (honestly, who could resist flipping past the teachy-preachy parts to sneak a peek into the book’s naughty bits?) give context to the earlier lessons by exploiting real world examples of bumbled goober-speak. One of Hale’s favorite targets is President Bush Sr., though she doesn’t discriminate—politicos, academics, and pompous “purple prose” authors are fair game. And once she demonstrates why, it becomes so obvious! Hale warns against treading in “The Danger Zone” the Stuffed Shirts seem to frequent, or you’re risking grammatically inept, slobbery writing—and that’ll do nuthin’ but make yuh sound dumb (or Texan). But Hale doesn’t just make fun of stumbling speakers and ballooned blowhards. She regularly injects examples of Mark Twain’s spirited prose to illustrate her maxims, inducing a few ‘So-that’s-what-she-means!’ sorta moments. Even Thoreau was a wordy fella and often mucked through six or seven rewrites before lighting on a final version. “You’d be surprised how little you need to get your points across. Strip sentences down. Clear out the clutter,” Hale writes. ‘Nuff said. Hale dispels some common controversies in written English (Never end a sentence with a preposition, Never split infinitives) and shovels advice on the proper use of grammatical Malvolios (who vs. whom, bad vs. badly, and the English preoccupation with and chronic abuse of the word ‘like’). Though she diagrams sentences with wild abandon and laces the boudoir with antecedents, high energy verbs, and saucy nouns, Hale’s kindler, gentler side entices writers to find the Music, Voice, Lyricism, Melody, and Rhythm in their work. Grammatical accuracy, while a noble objective, should not overrule the natural voice and rhythm in your writing, especially if your characters speak in dialects or distinctive language sets. If I had more room, I would eagerly compile lists of Hale’s Do’s and Don’ts, the words to politely avoid and words to torch at all costs, and the multiple examples of beauty risen from the swamps. The writer who absorbs Hale’s opus will, at first, wrestle in fits and starts with old habits fighting for their last sucks of oxygen. Let them suffocate. Sin and Syntax is a style manual for the modern writer, a diuretic for written bloat, preoccupied with a sole objective: truth in prose.