A Self Made of Words: Crafting a Distinctive Persona in Nonfiction Writing

Serial Constructions

68 } Serial constructions contain three or more phrases, or clauses, or sentences in parallel form. The parallel items in the series might be as few and as brief as the three short clauses in Caesar’s celebration of himself: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Or they might be more lengthy and vividly detailed, such as the three verb phrases in Thoreau’s celebration of a migrating bird: “The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we: he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou.” Or they might be as numerous as the predicate phrases in Samuel Johnson ’s gloomy reflections on human nature: “We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.” Or they might be as varied as the three sentences you’ve just finished reading in this segment, which togethercomprise a serial construction. Whatever their grammatical weight, serial structures tend to suggest the presence of someone taking a comprehensive view of things, as in Joan Didion’s reflections on why she writes: “I write to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” The effectiveness of a series is dependent not only on Serial Constructions { 69 the parallel form of its corresponding items but also on the presence or absence of linking words. In some cases, such as Caesar’s “I came, I saw, I conquered,” the absence of conjunctions, known as “asyndeton,” makes his achievements appear all the more swift than if the last clause were preceded by “and,” as in more conventional form. On the other hand, at the beginning of the third, fourth, and fifth sentences in the preceding paragraph, I’ve used more conjunctions than necessary (i.e., “Or. . . Or. . . Or. . .”), known as “polysyndeton,” to emphasize those parallel sentences, which might otherwise be overlooked , given the verbiage that separates each of them from theothers. A similaroption can be seen in the repetition or omission of words in a series of parallel items. In Johnson’s sentence, for example, “all” is repeated two times after its initial appearance but then is omitted in the later phrases by means of an “ellipsis,” which refers to the omission of a word or words that can be inferred from contextual clues, in this case from the parallel form. Whereas in Didion’s series, “what” is repeated from start to finish, emphasizing her commitment to writing as a mode of discovery. Nomatterhowlongorshortaseriesmightbe,whether linked or not by conjunctions, its sequence of assertions in parallel form serves to emphasize the corresponding import and interrelationship of its basic parts, as you can see in the following narrative of my tonsillectomy: I was ten years old, about to have my tonsils and adenoids taken out, and I didn’t like the prospect of being trapped on an operating table, didn’t like the thought of being knocked out by an anesthetic, 70 } and didn’t like the idea of someone reaching deep into my mouth with a scalpel in hand, cutting this way and that. But I never imagined that it would all transpire so swiftly, painlessly, and almost pleasantly. For right after being wheeled into the operating room, one of the doctors put a mask over my nose and mouth, told me to count quickly to fifty, and soon he and everyone else were spinning and spinning and spinning me into unconsciousness. The next thing I saw was a nurse standing by my bedside, looking down at me, asking if I’d like a dish of ice cream to cool and soothe my throat. Such a swift change of scene that I wondered if I had died and gone to heaven, for she sure was an angel, her smile was a blessing, and the ice cream was divine. In order to produce the serial constructions that pervade this version, I found it necessary to expand the detailing throughout, with the result that this piece offers a more amply developed narrative of my perceptions, thoughts, and feelings than previous versions of the story. Also a more emphatic narrative, thanks in part to the ellipsis of “I” in the first sentence, which gives more prominence to the repeated verb...