Building arguments one sentence at a time

One of the many reasons I like to assign shorter but more frequent writing assignments is that analyzing just a few grafs, or even ONE sentence, allows for more depth and more focus.

Here's an outstanding sentence from this New York Times article: “For more than a century, the Picture Collection of the New York Public Library has flourished, gloriously but precariously, as a shape-shifting misfit within a Dewey Decimal grid.”

This sentence comes quite early in the piece, right after a couple examples of how pictures in the collection have been used in the past. It functions as the "news lead," so to speak, or the answer to the question, "Why would I ever want to read this?" The story is not particularly timely -- it's not a big anniversary year -- but falls in the category of newspaper "feature" story. 

I have trouble defining exactly what a feature story is, though I know one when I see it. It's not breaking news, that's for sure.

Choices were made by the writer in terms of sentence structure (syntax) and word choice (diction), not to mention including a figure of speech (personification) and establishing a tone. When I taught AP Language, we often discussed how rhetoric was based on those four tools or devices: diction, syntax, figures of speech, and tone.

In terms of syntax, imagine moving that opening dependent clause somewhere else in the sentence. It might go after the word "flourished," but that puts space between the verb and those paired adverbs, which decreases their impact. You might place it at the very end of the sentence, but that saps the cool figure of speech of power. We might call this a cumulative sentence, BTW, that builds toward that rich ending.

St. Paul wrote about "faith, hope, and love (charity), with love the most important of the three." It's difficult to even imagine that series in a different order at this point, but the key rhetorical point is to place the key word LAST.

That parenthetical "gloriously but precariously," provides what good stories need: a bit of tension or at least a hint of a conflict. Diction was key here. In fact, simply choosing that pairing helps the writer organize the rest of the story. Once we mention those two adverbs, it is logical to make certain each of them is explored.

Finally, there is that provocative and poetic figure of speech that compares the building to a nonconventional human and finishes things off with a reference to the Dewey Decimal system, which most people younger than 50 would have little experience with.

The use of "shape-shifting" helps set readers up for a tale of how the institution's picture collection has changed over time in response to users' needs.

The tone of the piece is subdued but clear: readers are expected to both appreciate the tradition here and wonder a bit about the future. Again, this produces tension, and stories benefit from this. 

The reference to an outdated library cataloguing system seems like a clue to who the writer assumes is reading the story: People over 50.

In other words, there is a lot going on in this sentence, and the writer clearly spent extra time getting the sentence just right.

One question for writers is always "Are we willing to get a single sentence "just right"?