Oral Exercise.—Change the following sentences so that each shall have unity of form.
1. A blue pencil? there is nothing so easy for an editor to manage, so unmistakable in reading, so wholly impressive to a contributor when he sees it.
2. Tom and East became good friends, and the tyranny of a certain insolent fellow was sturdily resisted by them together.
3. You will see no sudden jerks of the St. Ambrose rudder, nor will any clumsy rounding of a point be seen.
4. Miller, motionless till now, lifts his right hand and the tassel is whirled round his head.
5. Thorold had just read the account of John Inglesant’s vision of the dead King Charles. He disliked the idea of spending the night in the old country house, and still more to go through the tapestried chamber; but it was immediately determined by him that such an invitation must not be refused.
The Loose Sentence.—The passage given at the beginning of the chapter, from Mandeville, is written in what are called loose sentences. Loose as applied to a sentence, does not necessarily mean that the sentence is bad,—that it is rambling or disjointed. A loose sentence is one in which an independent statement comes first, followed by others, dependent or independent. Example: “And some men say that in the Isle of Lango is yet the daughter of Hippocrates, in form and likeness of a great dragon, that is a hundred fathom of length, as men say: for I have not seen her.” In this sentence comes first a proposition,—“And some men say,” followed by several subordinate clauses, and by one independent clause,—“for I have not seen her.” The test of a loose sentence is a grammatical one: the sentence can be closed at some point before the end, without hurting the grammatical structure. At what places in the sentence just quoted is the grammatical structure complete?
The loose sentence is used freely in conversation. The speaker gives his main idea first, and qualifies it afterward. Therefore the legitimate effect of the loose sentence is to lend an air of simplicity, a colloquial air, to the style. The danger is that it may become a mere sequence of clauses, that dangle insecurely, each from the preceding, like needles hanging from a magnet. Avoid long loose sentences.
Examine the sentence by Defoe, [p. 89]. It is a fine example of what a loose sentence should not be.