Tufte Virginia. Grammar as Style

Holt, 1971. — 280 pages. — SBN: 03-079610-5; SBN: 03-079615-6.From PrefaceGrammar as Style is a study of grammatical patterns and the way they work in the hands of contemporary professional writers. It is addressed to anyone interested in stylistic theory and practice. I hope it will find readers among teachers and prospective teachers of English; students of composition, creative writing, grammar, literature, stylistics, and literary criticism; and writers outside the classroom who are interested in studying professional techniques. Each chapter, except the first, concentrates on a major syntactic structure or concept and considers its stylistic role in sentences from twentiethcentury fiction and nonfiction. In all, the book includes fifteen major grammatical topics and more than a thousand samples of modern prose. I have tried not to depend on old assumptions about style but to take a fresh look, through syntactic glasses, at the actual practices of today’s writers. Although I have examined a fair number of samples—many more than are quoted—it may well be that in some instances other samples would have supported different conclusions. I hesitate even to use the word conclusions; observations is more accurate. The book is exploratory rather than definitive, and its method is more important than its statements.The Relation of Grammar to Style
Kernel Sentences
Noun Phrases
Verb Phrases
Adjectives and Adverbs
Prepositions
Conjunctions and Coordination
Dependent Clauses
Sentence Openers and Inversion
Free Modifiers: Right-Branching, Mid-Branching, and Left-Branching Sentences
The Appositive
Interrogative, Imperative, Exclamatory
The Passive Transformation
Parallelism
Cohesion
Syntactic Symbolism: Grammar as Analogue