Mary Duffys Sentence Openers

Chapter 7 Absolute Phrases as Sentence Openers

When a reader says of a book, I couldnt put it down, you may be sure that the writer
has deployedconsciously and with skillall of the above techniques to keep the reader turning
the pages.
In the Art of Fiction, Henry James says, The only obligation to which in advance we
may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
Yet, he went on to write lengthy novels that today only the patient and sympathetic followers
ever read.
Readers complain that though they would like to read James monster-novels from
beginning to end, they dont get beyond the first chapter. Why is this? A great deal of it has to do
James style: long convoluted sentences in the S-V-O patterna catastrophic formula for dull,
tedious, soporific reading.
As we have seen, the choice of sentence openers keeps the reader interested, breaking up
the monotony of the S-V-O pattern. By mixing and commingling the sentence openers we have
discussed, your prose will become athletic, exciting, breathlessnever boring.
Nominative Absolutes may also be used as sentence openers! Absolutes, then become
unsurpassed tools to spice up and revive sentences that otherwise might lay dead on arrival.
Take the following plain sentence:
Louise rushed to the bathroom where she scrubbed her hands thoroughly.

And compare it to the same sentence preceded by a nominative absolute as opener:

Hands trembling, Louise rushed to the bathroom where she scrubbed her hands
thoroughly.

Not only does Salman Rushdie in his novel Midnights Children begins his sentence
with an absolute, but with two! As if lips clamped wasnt enough to depict the emotion of the
scene, he adds a second absolute: eyes squeezed.
Lips clamped; eyes squeezed, a single violent No from the head and my grandfather
goes into the streets alone (32).

Mary Duffys Sentence Openers

CHAPTER 8 CORRELATIVE CONJUNCTIONS AS OPENERS

By choosing to start his long novel David Copperfield with the correlative conjunction
whether/or, Charles Dickens signals the reader that perhaps we should search of more than one
hero in the story. This is a startling beginning:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be
held by anybody else, these pages must show.

And from Jane Austens Sense and Sensibility note how by opening the sentence with the
correlative conjunction neither/nor, the narrator nudges the reader to expect an answer or
clarification of character:
Neither Lady Middleton nor Mrs. Jennings could supply to her the conversation she
missed; although the latter was an everlasting talker, and from the first had regarded her
with a kindness which ensured her a large share of her discourse.

Because correlative conjunctions add clarity, crispness, and fluidity to the narrative, these
pairs are quite transparent to the reader; they perform their function in an unobtrusive manner.
Thus we can say that correlative conjunctions dont call attention to themselves:
both . . . and
either . . . or
just as . . . so
neither . . . nor
not only . . . but
not only . . . but also
not only because . . . but also because
whether . . . or

In his novelette Breakfast at Tiffanys, master writer Truman Capote chooses the
both/and pair as a sentence opener:
Both Holly and I used to go there six, seven times a day, not for a drink, not always, but
to make telephone calls: during the war a private telephone was hard to come by.

Joyce Carol Oates, in her essay Running and Writing,

Both running and writing are highly addictive activities; both are, for me, inextricably
bound up with consciousness.

When they are chosen as sentence openers, these pairs stir up the readers attention,
making them wonder why they have been uprooted from the middle to the front. Why has the
furniture been rearranged? they would ask.

Mary Duffys Sentence Openers

Laura Esquivel in her novel Like Water for Chocolate:
Either her blouse had a wrinkle, or there wasnt enough hot water, or her braid came out
unevenin short, it seemed Mama Elenas genius was for finding fault (Esquivel 95).

Robert Graves in his novel I, Claudius:

Either she would refuse it or she would accuse him of wasting on other women what he
denied her (22).
Either the fellow galloped off the field or surrendered instead of fighting, or some
officious private soldier got the blow in first (44).
Not only did she manage her huge household in the efficient way I have described, but
she bore an equal share with him in public business (29).

In his aesthetics treatise Art as Experience, note how John Dewey, the American
philosopher, opens his sentences:
Not only does the direct sense element and emotion is a mode of sense tend to
absorb all ideational matter, but apart from special discipline enforced by physical
apparatus, it subdues and digests all that is merely intellectual (30).
Neither a world wholly obdurate and sullen in the face of man nor one so congenial to
his wishes that it gratifies all desired is a world in which art can arise (339).
Neither the savage nor the civilized man is what he is by native constitution but by the
culture in which he participates (345).
Either the maker had no experience that was emotionally toned, or although having at
the outset a felt emotion, it was not sustained, and a succession of unrelated emotions
dictated the work (69).

Besides being a pragmatist American Philosopher, John Dewey was a progressive

educator. And while philosophical tracts are daunting, difficult, tedious, and often intractable to
the common reader, Deweys writings remain fresh and accessible. Most of the techniques we
advocate in this textbook may be found in Art as Experience.
Ethics philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his A Short History of Ethics uses the following
pairs as sentence openers:
Either they are highly specialized concepts belonging within stable and continuing
disciplines, such as geometry; or else they are highly general concepts necessary to any
language of any complexity.

And in the following example from the Vicar of Wakefield, the narrator by means of the
pair neither nor injects a flash forward to advance the story:
Neither the fatigues and dangers he was going to encounter, nor the friends and mistress,

Mary Duffys Sentence Openers

for Miss Wilmot actually loved him, he was leaving behind, [in] any way damped his
spirits (Goldsmith 134).

And Laura Esquivel once again:

Neither she nor Rosaura knew how to make them; when Tita died, her familys past
would die with her (Esquivel 179).
Not only could she crack sack after sack of nuts in a short time, [but] she seemed to take
great pleasure in doing it (231).

Master writers exploit the minds expectation for closure. When in common speech we
hear the expression, Like waiting for the other shoe to tall, we quickly grasp and agree that
theres an imminent expectation that perhaps bodes ill.
It may not be necessarily so, but we cant help to expect something nefarious.
With these pithy words (correlative conjunctions), professional writers create hook
sentences and hook paragraphs. As can be seen from the examples cited above, correlative
conjunctions may be used for both fiction and non-fiction.
What makes correlative conjunctions practical is their versatility; they may be repeated to
join related ideas into a coherent sentence, as we can see in the following example from Ford
Madox Fords The March of Literature:
Whether he made his letters with the chisel on stone, or painted his ideographs on the
walls of temples or palaces, whether he wrote with a stylus on tablets of wax, or incised
them on rolls of clay which were afterwards baked, or whether in the end he wrote much
as we write with a split reed upon sheets of papyrus which is the inner fiber of the
papyrus plantalways a sort of priestly or layer-like respectability attached to the man
who could write at all (26).

In academic writing, theorists use these pairs to contrast competing and often opposite
ideas, as we can see in Linda Hutcheons A Poetics of Modernism:
Whether we use a model of double encoding or one of ideological unmarking, the point is that postmodernism
has been both acclaimed and attacked by both ends of the political spectrum because its inherently paradoxical
structure permits contradictory interpretations: these forms of aesthetic practice and theory both install and subvert
prevailing norms artistic and ideological (ch13, 223).