Hey everyone. Back again with another post for another week. This week we’ll be talking about another one of my favorite characteristics of prose. This characteristic also effects the voice of your writing as we discussed in the last post. So, without further ado,
Prose: Syntax
The first time I actually heard about Syntax was not from another writer, or from a writings post, or from a writing conference. It was actually in my 11th grade AP English class. We were being taught why and how to annotate our books for the assignments in class. I remember nodding along and thinking that all the things were were supposed to tab for made a lot of sense like historical context, metaphor, and other things. I remember that the only thing on the list that I didn’t recognize was Syntax. I had no idea what syntax was and was surprised to see it on a list of things I was supposed to annotate for.
After class I did what every research inclined literati would do. I researched syntax. I read several webpages and writing blogs and found a book on syntax at the library that I could skim and look through. The basic understanding of syntax that I developed that time in my AP English class has affected both my ficitonal and nonfictional writing ever since.
The basic definition and understanding of syntax is the arrangment of words or phrases or develop sentences. There are many different aspects of syntax but the basic understanding is that syntax is the arangment of words into sentences. Every language has its own form of syntax and many a linguist has dedicated their lives to the study of syntactic structure and the similarities and differences of various languages. However, when it comes to writing (specifically the fictional kind) I want to discuss a few aspects of syntax that I have found useful for me when writing and when editing.
One of the characteristics of syntax that I found useful was the syntax of active or passive voice. As discussed last week the writing voice of a single author is often made up of the various aspects that create the narrative personality of the story such as the syntax, vocabulary, point of view, etc. One of the aspects of syntax that can change your narrative voice is active or passive voice. An active voice sentences is a sentence that contains action – it is acting not being acted upon. Passive voice then is the opposite – a sentence that lacks action. One of the best ways (and also the most fun way) to tell if your sentence is active or passive is to add the phrase ‘by zombies’ to it. If the phrase ‘by zombies’ can be added and make grammatical sense then your sentence is passive.
For example, “New projects were handed out by zombies yesterday.” This sentence still makes sense with addition of the phrase 'by zombies’ after the verb. However, this sentence with the same meaning does not. Our VP handed out by zombies new projects yesterday. In this way we know whether the sentence is active or passive.
But what does this have to do with syntax? It’s simple really. If the sentence is passive you don’t need to scrap it completley – you just need to change the syntax. If you change the syntax you can turn a passive sentence into an active sentence. In this way you can make give your writing more action and more strength even when your character isn’t doing anything more than sitting at home making dinner.
The other aspect of syntax I wanted to discuss in this post was the syntax of sentence length. Since syntax is the organization or words and phrases to makes sentences it stands to reason that syntax also applies to the length of the sentences when it comes to writing. Not only as writers do we need to develop well rounded characters, create flowing and natural writing, and sometimes design and create whole words but we also need to pay attention to and watch how long our sentences are!
Different sentence lengths can have different impacts and meaning to readers. For example, if you are trying to show your reader that your character is a bit of a windbag without telling them, “This character is a windbag” make most of their dialogue run on sentences. Often times I will see writers show that their character is a windbag by making them go on and on and on about unrelated material. Sometimes this makes sense but if you are writing an epic fantasy novel you do not want your character to go off on a rant about something unrelated for half a page. It ruins the flow of the story. However, if they speak just how a character normally would but their sentences are longer and some are run on sentences this makes it more clear to the reader that this character does a lot of useless talking without having to state it directly.
On the other hand, perhaps several short quick sentences one next to the other indicates to the reader that the character is nervous, anxious, or fearful. These kinds of sentence lengths can be very helpful in indicating character mood and can also often help your reader develop stronger feelings and emotions towards characters as the sentence lengths can often create the same feelings in a reader subconciously.
You can also use short sentences on separate lines following and preceded by larger paragraphs to create emphasis to a sentence. If you want your character to have a great revelation it can be useful to separate it by larger and more impactful sentences. We’ll discuss more about the length of writing and how it’s important to prose in a later post so we won’t go into it too much now.
Syntax is important.
If you don’t catch anything else from this post it should be this. Syntax is important to a lot of different aspects of writing and there are many other aspects of syntax that I did not include in this post because then it would have been a 2 hour read instead of a few minutes. I hope that this post inspires you to learn a little bit more about syntax and helps you to understand a little bit more about it’s importance in prose writing. Maybe next time you are writing you will start to notice how the syntax of your writing effects everything else. Maybe try practicing writing the same scene but changing the syntax a bit. You never know what could happen.
That’s all I have for this weeks post. I hope it was a little bit helful to some of you. This series has been a lot of fun to work on so far and I am very excited to be coming back again next week with some more. Next week we’ll be discussing cliches. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media at the link on the bottom of the page. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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