Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style

Stylistics has always been plagued by an inability to distinguish personal prejudice from objective fact. A sentence that rings balanced and elegant to one ear will be too symmetric and overdone for another. Truth is, there's really no accounting for tastes. Needless to say, this has only spurred critics to try to do just that. This book of "artful sentences" is one such effort. It is basically an endless stream of exemplar sentences bracketed with unilluminating syntactical remarks. The basic format is as follows: the author demonstrates an 'artful sentence;' A quick syntactical analysis shows such-and-such arrangement of noun-phrases modified by, say, appositives, participial phrases and crafty adverbs; Q.E.D! Onwards to the next exhibition. When every syntactical arrangement has an artful exemplar, surely it argues *against* making a fetish of style? If there is any value to this book, perhaps it lies in the claim that some sentence structures work better than others in certain contexts. Even if this claim is granted, Stylistics, despite its pretensions, has no special insight into the How or the Why.

After all of these wonderful reviews, I do not like to hit a discordant note. However, I was disappointed by this book. The sentences selected are definitely artful, as promised in the title, and the author's knowledge of syntax is complete. One would think that these two features alone would be enough to make it a fine book. It is not.

The author moves from one structure to another touching all of the syntactical bases. Seasoned with artful sentences I was not always able to make the connection between the syntax and the example. Here's the syntax structure, and now here are the examples. Next. The author marches on.

I still believe that if I read this book, simply by looking at all of the great sentences, I will get something out of it. Maybe if the author allowed herself to savor the sentences a bit more, I would not get the feeling of reading a recipe book that is labeled well but meaningless. So while I believe this book to be a grand idea, I did not find its execution grand at all.

This book has a wonderful variety of creative and artful sentences to add to your own vocabulary of creativeness.

I cannot put this book down. It is beautifully bound and published. Virginia's insight into sentence structure and style expose the sheer beauty of the English language. She talks of participles, prepositions, nouns, verbs, phrases, all as if they are musical notes in the great symphony of the sentence, the orchestration of the paragraph. Her examples are exquisite and she dissects each, how it flows, how each part of the sentences has a particular effect, how the effects impact the reader.
Buy this book, read it again and again.

I've given this book to friends who have given it to theirs. It's a book that sits on my library table instead of my bookshelf. I like to pick it up, and flip through the pages until I settle on an appealing passage. To characterize Artful Sentences as a book on grammar, or as a book written expressly for the classroom, is to miss the point (although I would surely assign it to students in a writing class, for my own pleasure as much as for pedagogical reasons). Tufte's prose is spare and elegant, complementing the nuanced quotes that she has selected to reinforce her points. Altogether this is a stimulating, delightful and substantive book.