Lawrence, the anti-Nabokov

He uses many short, simple sentences, as well as relatively simple vocabulary. He usually starts with the subject then moves on to the verb/adjective. We have lots of adjectives actually. But he doesn't tend to list them like other authors we've read. He also starts off with independent clauses in many of his sentences. I noticed a lot of pattern 12 to describe situations, and a decent use of prepositional phrases. He especially uses the word "but", which goes with the story line of this family looks perfectly normal on the outside but obviously they are not. There really wasn't much imagery nor description. After reading Nabokov his style seems plain, boring, and unimaginative. He does possess the clarity Orwell wrote about, but in my opinion this style doesn't work for Lawrence when it comes to fiction. Where is the imagery? Where are the metaphors? This is far too bland, it needs spice.

Orwell

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

All of this is the journalist in Orwell manifesting himself. Straight, simple, to the point, easy to read - this is all characteristically journalistic. I’m sure he hated both Joyce for his never-ending sentences and Nabokov for his overly intellectual language. Most of this piece is formatted in lists such as the above. Making list and using simple language makes it harder to argue with him because his ideas are so cleanly formatted. It’s almost as if a lawyer wrote this.

There are a lot of pattern 1 and pattern 2 and pattern 3 sentence structures. However, the following has a combination of pattern 3 combined with a 16a-ish pattern– “If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” But mostly we find either pattern 2 or 3 and a ton of modifiers companied with metaphors.

Here we have an a complex sentence with multiple layers followed by Orwellian Metaphor – “But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Lastly, I will deconstruct the following:
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity [simple sentence]. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink [Dependent clauses followed with a modifiers and metaphor]. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics [simple sentence]." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia [16 and 4]. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer [7a]. I should expect to find--this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify--that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship [11a].”

Joyce

She was an active, practical woman of middle age.

Not long before she had celebrated her silver wedding and renewed her intimacy with her husband by waltzing with him to Mr. Power's accompaniment.

In her days of courtship, Mr. Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure: and she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding was reported and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled with vivid pleasure how she had passed out of the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, leaning on the arm of a jovial well-fed man, who was dressed smartly in a frock-coat and lavender trousers and carried a silk hat gracefully balanced upon his other arm [Compound sentence with semicolon, no conjunction].

After three weeks she had found a wife's life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she had become a mother[A series with variation].

The part of mother presented to her no insuperable difficulties and for twenty-five years she had kept house shrewdly for her husband [pattern9a].

Her two eldest sons were launched [simple].

One was in a draper's shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea- merchant in Belfast.

They were good sons, wrote regularly and sometimes sent home money [pattern 7a].

The other children were still at school [Simple sentence].

Poetic devices noted:
Alliteration - "Celebrated her silver" and "intimacy with her husband by waltzing"
Strange word choice - irksome
Repetition - "mother. The part of mother..."

Lolita

Sybil was my mother's older rigid sister, who I liked very much despite the fact that she was also in love with my father, and married to my father's cousin, and then served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Aunt Sybil wrote wrote self fufilling poetry about how she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, her pink-rimmed azure eyes would scan the writing as her waxen complexion glistend. Her husband would spent most of his time traveling, espically in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.

Bill Clinton

Clinton's speech makes many attempt at convincing his audience that he's simply one of us. For example, he starts with"My fellow citizens", then uses the words "we" and "us" repeatedly. Each word shows up sixty plus times throughout the speech.

He also uses running sentences in order to give off a kind of sincerity:

"And I thank the millions of men and women whose steadfastness and sacrifice triumphed over Depression, fascism and Communism.
Today, a generation raised in the shadows of the Cold War assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom but threatened still by ancient hatreds and new plagues." But there were also periodic sentences to convey the same ideas:

"Today, a generation raised in the shadows of the Cold War assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom but threatened still by ancient hatreds and new plagues."

Obviously, there was much mentioned about the American struggle in the past and how that effected the then present time.

Overall, I found his vocabulary simple yet elegant. Instead of using fancy words, he uses imagery and metaphors. "This ceremony is held in the depth of winter. But, by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring." There were also a lot of simple sentences with poetic elements. His rhythm was strong and steady. "

My personal favorite quotes from the speech were: "Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world, and the urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy," and "Though we march to the music of our time, our mission is timeless."

I noticed there was a lot of mention of change, the word occurs eleven times to be exact. His mention of change went hand-in-hand with his emphasis on hope despite the evident struggles to be faced. This, of course, reminded me much of Obama.

A silver dish

"Then for the rest of the week Woody [use of alliteration] was busy, had jobs to run, office responsibilities, family responsibilities [repetition of words and ideas]. He lived alone; as did his wife; as did his mistress: everybody in a separate establishment. Since his wife, [use of subject first in the sentence] after fifteen years of separation, had not learned to take care of herself, Woody did her shopping on Fridays, filled her freezer [important details in front, less important details follow making the sentence peculiar]. He had to take her this week to buy shoes. Also, Friday night he always spent with Helen—Helen was his wife de facto [once again, subject comes before important idea]. Saturday he did his big weekly shopping. Saturday night he devoted to Mom and his sisters [repetition with the word Saturday]. So he was too busy to attend to his own feelings except, intermittently, to note to himself, “First Thursday in the grave.” “First Friday [alliteration], and fine weather.” “First Saturday; he’s got to be getting used to it.” Under his breath he occasionally said, “Oh, Pop.”

Overall I noticed that the author tends to arrange sentences like he rearranges his story. First comes the subject of the story, his father. Then comes all these details and repetitions. He sneaks important information out of nowhere. His transitions are sudden, which makes the reader feel like they're on a roller coaster. He tells the story in different bursts of perspective in regards to time. First we are with pop, then he is dead, then we are back with him, and so on.

???

I guess I'm suppose to post two examples of noun and verb styles of writing. So here it goes:

I think this has more nouns - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8233265.stm

The article starts as follows: "Abdullah Laghmani and at least 21 other people were killed in the attack on a mosque in the town of Mehtar Lam.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, told AP news agency a suicide bomber had targeted Mr Laghmani." and later continues in past tesnse with little to no verbs such as "Reports say a suicide bomber detonated his explosives in a crowd of officials - including Mr Laghmani - who had gathered outside the mosque in Mehtar Lam for a ceremony."

And this has more verbs -

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090902/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_tv_debates;_ylt=AuY2ugUHTCnMSKioUEVb2NN0bBAF;_ylu=X3oDMTJyOXJ0ZTI1BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkwOTAyL2V1X2JyaXRhaW5fdHZfZGViYXRlcwRwb3MDNARzZWMDeW5fcGFnaW5hdGVfc3VtbWFyeV9saXN0BHNsawN0dmNoYW5uZWxwbGE-

The article starts with this: "Prime Minister Gordon Brown is weighing an invitation to debate with his two main rivals on live television — a first for Britain where leaders have resisted the sort of debates that can make or break election campaigns in countries like the U.S. and Australia."

Already we are drawn to action. Debates, resistance, etc.

Then there are passages which verbs are used to claim future happenings, take the following:

"Next year's election will likely see Britain change its government for the first time since 1997. For more than 12 months, opinion polls have predicted Brown's governing Labour Party will lose to the opposition Conservatives."