Download ANSWER: Inverted

Grammar as
Rhetoric and Style
Cumulative, Periodic, and Inverted Sentences
Simple Sentence
Most of the time, writers of English use the
following standard sentence patterns:
• Subject/Verb: I cried.
• Subject/Verb/Subject Complement: Even the
streams were now lifeless.
• Subject/Verb/Direct Object: We believed her.
Making Longer Sentences
Writers often coordinate two or more of the standard sentence
patterns or subordinate one sentence pattern to another.
Coordinating Patterns:
Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened
somewhere, and may real communities have already suffered a
substantial number of them.
Subordinating One Pattern to Another:
And when they arrived on the edge of Mercury, they carried all
the butterflies of a summer day in their wombs.
The problem…
The downside to sticking with standard sentence patterns,
coordinating them, or subordinating them is that too many
standard sentences in a row become monotonous. So…
• Writers break out of the standard patterns now and then by
using a more unusual pattern, such as the cumulative,
periodic, or inverted sentence.
• When using one of these sentence patterns, you call attention
to that sentences.
• It contrasts significantly with the pattern of the sentences
surrounding it.
• Unusual sentence patterns can emphasize a point, control
sentence rhythm, increase tension, or create dramatic impact.
• It helps you avoid monotony in your writing.
Cumulative Sentence
The cumulative (or loose) sentence begins with a standard
sentence pattern and adds multiple details after it. The details
can take the form of subordinate clauses or different kinds of
phrases. These details accumulate, or pile up—hence, the name
cumulative.
EXAMPLES:
The women moved through the streets as winged messengers,
twirling around each other in slow motion, peeking inside
homes and watching the easy sleep of men and women.
We have grown into everywhere, spreading like a new growth
over the entire surface, touching and affecting every other kind
of life, incorporating ourselves.
Periodic Sentence
The periodic sentence begins with multiple details and holds off
a standard sentence pattern—or at least its predicate—until the
end.
EXAMPLE
Human beings, large terrestrial metazoans, fired by energy from
microbial symbionts lodged in their cells, instructed by tapes of
nucleic acid stretching back to the earliest live membranes,
informed by neurons essentially the same as all the other
neurons on earth, sharing structures with mastodons and
lichens, living off the sun, are now in charge, running the place,
for better or worse.
Inverted Sentence
A standard sentence has the subject come before the verb. A
writer may choose to invert the sentence, however, by placing
the verb before the subject.
EXAMPLE
In the woods, is perpetual youth.
• Slows the reader down because it is simply more difficult to
comprehend inverted word order.
Identify each of the following sentences as periodic,
cumulative, or inverted, and discuss the impact of using
that pattern. Please note that each sentence is a direct
quotation.
LET’S PRACTICE!
1. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or
gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms,
passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and
death.
ANSWER: Cumulative
2. Among them are many that are used in man’s war against
nature.
ANSWER: Inverted
3. I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against
my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with emotions which
an angel might share.
ANSWER: Cumulative
4. Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the
afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset.
ANSWER: Periodic
5.
When a noble act is done,--perchance in a scene of great natural
beauty; when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume
one day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at
them once in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when Arnold
Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche,
gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for
his comrades, are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of
the scene to the beauty of the deed?
ANSWER: Periodic
6.
Regret maybe you’ll consider.
ANSWER: Inverted
7.
How to get power? is what they’re thinking.
ANSWER: Inverted
8.
What’s at stake as they busy themselves are your tax dollars and
mine, and ultimately our freedom too.
ANSWER: Periodic
Resources
Shea, Renee, Lawrence Scanlon, and Robin Dissin Aufses. The
Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric, 2nd
ed., Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013.