Writing with Eloquence
It’s Not Stealing. It’s Learning to Be Creative
You don’t need a complete sentence to set a scene or be stylish, sassy, or convincing
Bleak House by Charles Dickens begins:
“London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth . . .”
It’s a powerful introduction. It sets a dark and moody scene. So, I stole it. In my latest guide to Scotland (work in progress), my third chapter began:
“The City of Inverness is the northernmost settlement of any considerable size in Scotland.”
Since reading Dicken’s amazing rhetorical technique, I’ve changed it.
“Inverness. Our northernmost city. Occupying the glacial basin where the Moray Firth and the Great Glen of Scotland meet up for tea and scones.”
Better?
The first line sets the scene with brevity and clarity. With the second, I’m not trying to be dark and moody, I’m trying to convey the style of writing to come — it may still need some work.
It feels like theft, but it isn’t. I’ve not plagiarised Dickens. I’ve learned a rhetorical device and used it. It’s called schesis onomaton.
Schesis onomaton (also spelled scesis onomaton) consists of a sentence constructed only of nouns and adjectives.
Going back to basics
What is missing from these sentences?
- I football.
- They quickly.
- We pasta.
- Bob learning rhetorical devices.
Camera ready. Roll sound. — “Action!”
They are missing a verb. Schesis onomaton is simply a sentence without a verb.
English class.
“When we write, we should use complete sentences.” — Miss Smith.
She abhorred the missing verb.
Sentences without verbs can be abstruse, ambiguous, baffling. Schesis onomaton is all these things. But it is also capable of being memorable, striking, and wondrous.
In Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. The opening two sentences provide a more succinct example:
“Zest. Gusto.”
Two words. Two sentences. Unusually striking. Bradbury uses these two rarely used words instantly get to his point. And within the first paragraph, he explains why zest and gusto are the most important ingredients a writer can have.
Television and films are adept in their usage:
“Space: the final frontier.”
Star Trek’s famous mantra. Try rewriting that without the missing verbs:
This is space, which is the last frontier.
Not so memorable, is it?
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”
Star Wars, too, is quick to set the scene. We don’t know what is out there nobody has been, so the reader has to imagine. And that is what schesis onomaton does, it kick starts our imagination.
We encounter verbless sentences in our conversation.
“Hung over?”
“Damn vodka.”
“Hair of the dog?”
“Great job!”
These lack a verb but still function as sentences. They are not unusual, but they are not schesis onomaton. There is nothing special about them.
They become special when we introduce a reader to a location or convey meaning, a sense of something — despair, perhaps. In literature, it can quickly set the scene in the reader’s mind.
A book. Fireplace flames. A milk mustache. Unrelenting rain.
What scene did you imagine?
A child sat by the crackling fire, a half glass of milk by his side, absorbed by the book on his lap. Warmed by the flickering fire as the unrelenting rain battered on the leaded window like a desperate man in seek of shelter.
There is something right and wrong with both.
Not everyone will agree on what is right or what is wrong. In the former, the reader is free to create their own image. The latter constrains the reader to the writer’s description.
The point of the exercise and this article is to introduce you to a creative writing technique that can instantly paint a scene in the mind of the reader.
It needn’t be short. Here is John Banville in Mefisto describing a hospital setting:
“Sighs, groans. Shouts in the night. An old man puking up gouts of green stuff, leaning over the side of the bed, a young nurse holding his forehead. Slow, wet, coughs, like the noise of defective suction pumps ponderously labouring. In the huge, white-tiled bathrooms, little labels exhorting patients not to spit in the handbasins. Everywhere the same thick cream paint, smooth as enamel, clammy as skin. I wore a mouse-colour dressing-gown with faded red piping.
He is painting an unpleasant scene. And he is doing it without complete sentences. The action is implied. It is an effective description.
You get the picture.
A secondary meaning
The problem with schecis onomaton is it isn’t in any dictionary. You have to search elsewhere. And when you do, you find schesis onomaton has a secondary definition:
“It later came to mean a series of nouns and adjectives or any series of words that were synonymous expressions.” — Wikipedia.Org
The website American Rhetoric describes Sc[h]esis Onomaton (skee’-sis-ah-no-maw-ton):
“Figure of repetition in which a set of two or more different words having the same (or very nearly the same) meaning occurs within the same sentence; a successive series of words or phrases whose meanings are generally equivalent.”
In the second sense, it is used to emphasize an idea by repeating it rapidly using slightly different words that have the same or a very similar meaning
Here are some examples:
“Life is short, time is swift, no opportunity should be missed.” — Unknown
It can be rhythmic and forceful.
“We succeeded, we were victorious, we accomplished the feat!” — Praneet Kang
Top writers are using it here on Medium.
I don’t enjoy waking up early, but, after years of shift work, I have no choice in the matter. Do you care? I think not. Here is May Pang telling you the same thing.
“I hate waking up early. Abhor, detest, loathe — those would not be words too strong to describe how I feel about early mornings.” — May Pang
This is not wordiness, it’s stylish, sassy, convincing — we feel her anguish.
The beauty of learning these rhetorical devices is you can use them to improve your writing.
In editing this piece, I realised I had used the second definition of schesis onomaton to describe its original definition:
“Sentences without verbs can be abstruse, ambiguous, baffling. Schesis onomaton is all these things. But it is also capable of being memorable, striking, and wondrous.”
Once you use them, they become natural additions to your writing. And that is a good thing.
You might also like —
