Prepositions and Syncopations: wrangling short sentences

And why it's worth it

Some years back, in the very early days of drafting what has become The Bruegel Boy, I found myself asking this of a group of writer-friends:

Q: Minor rhythm question. Which works best?

1. I pulled my cap down and turned my collar up.

2. I pulled my cap down and turned up my collar.

3. I pulled down my cap and turned up my collar.

4. I pulled down my cap and turned my collar up.

More people liked the fourth than any other, but there was strong support for the first one too. Poet Irene Cunningham said, ‘I like up on the end. It has a final feel to it, almost onomatopoeic because you can feel the shrug of the shoulders.’ Which is exactly one of the reasons I love poets’ input into prose, and why I’m always telling prose-writers to take poetry courses.

Then novelist Louse Cole said, ‘Second for me. The musicality is better and it’s not a self-conscious parallel.’

Crime novelist Margaret Kirk pointed out that some might worry about the ‘rule’ about not ending a sentence with a preposition (as in ‘turned my collar up.’) and that made me remember the ‘rule’ about not separating the two parts of a phrasal verb (as in ‘pulled my cap down’).

But ‘pulled on’ and ‘turned up’ are phrasal verbs not prepositional verbs: a unit of verb+preposition which can be split (if you like or get anxious about this stuff, that’s a good link).

And if the more important work of making the sentence as effective as possible means the preposition bit of the verb ends up at the end, then I agree with the great Ernest Gowers, who apparently called this shibboleth a ‘cherished superstition’, and apparently also Winston Churchill: the prohibition is a piece of pedantry up with which I will not put.

Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

Switching the whole thing round

Irene’s point about ending ‘up’ got me trying ending with ‘down’, which gave me four more possibilities:

1. I turned my collar up and pulled my cap down.

2. I turned my collar up and pulled down my cap.

3. I turned up my collar and pulled my cap down.

4. I turned my collar up and pulled down my cap.

Clearly there’s no correct or incorrect here, let alone a right or wrong. So which do you like? More, or less, than your favourite of the first set?

As novelist April Doyle said, ‘On its own I like the way the sentence starts with up and ends with down, feels tidier, but if you end with up it sort of launches into the next sentence, which might work much better.’

So what is going on in all this?

In playing with these, I realised, among other things:

• It’s all about rhythm. I’ll spare you the fully marked-up stress-pattern thing, but briefly:

  • Do you want a repeated pattern, setting up a matching-rhythm phrase ‘I turned up my collar / [I] pulled down my cap’ (and taking the rhythmic position of a second I). The only variation in syllables - cap versus collar - is tucked into the end. It’s strong, the repeat reinforcing the physicality of the actions, but that’s too strong for Louise, to whom it felt like ‘a self-conscious parallel’.

  • But although ‘collar’ and ‘cap’ are both nouns, cap ends the sentence with a stressed syllable, while collar ends on an un-stressed syllable. One reason that poets spend so much time on lineation is that in English the ending of a phrase, or a line, is where it stores its power.¹ Does ending on a ‘tum-ti’, not a ‘tum’ soften the impact?

  • Do you want set a pattern up with, for example ‘I turned my collar up’ but immediately syncopate it into something else: ‘I pulled down my cap’. Here the relatively un-stressed place of my in the first phrase is taken by the stronger down in the second?

• It’s also about sound, and where the half-rhymes stand relative to each other: I/my, coll-/pull-, up/cap, pulled/turned. Again - do the two halves of the sentence match each other, or set up a counter-point?

• As April says, the choice of ending - up or down, collar or cap - also affects how we launch into the next phrase. The thing is, so much depends on what has just been in our ears, and what will come next (and I do mean ears: reader’s speech-perceptions are always part of their experience, even in reading to themselves).

• It might also be about voice; here, it’s relatively neutral, but which would your narrator say?

Fundamentally, the story and logic of these versions are all identical, and they all conform to the rules of grammar, punctuation and syntax. So what’s at stake here is your decision about the silent sounds of prose on the page.

How it ended up

So, what did I do? This is how it ended up.

By now it was almost dark, but in any village there is still the vigilant widow, the assiduous sexton, and the old man bored enough to relish making trouble, and they all knew me. I pulled down my cap and turned up my collar.

The walk had been nothing to me in the old days, but I was tired and footsore as I reached Pater Paulus’s door and put my hand to the knocker. And what if the White Canons heard I was back?

And, yes, it does make a difference that there’s a paragraph break after the sentence in question. Paragraph breaks are like extra-big sentence-ends: the last word or two rings across the gap and here it’s the only two-syllable word, with its wobbly, unstressed finish.

Having said that, I should emphasise that my final choice wasn’t a conscious, reasoned one: it just felt right.

But - crucially - it was the slow thinking (in Daniel Kahneman's formulation), the forum posting, the different likes, dislikes and reasons, that enable me to lay out all the options for myself, as you choose what to wear for an event by laying out all the options and switching a few combinations about and stare.

Then ‘fast thinking’ kicks in: you stare again, pounce, and get dressed. My final decision was intuitive: all I bothered to be conscious of was that it felt right.

Sure, if I analyse why it ended up like that, I could say that I like the tired plod of the regular beat being repeated in the second, identically-structured phrase. And I like even more the unstressed ending on ‘collar’, which is suddenly a little irregular and uncertain, and seems right for someone who is tired and nervous.

But those would be analyses after the event. As I said of writing formal commentaries for creative writing courses, writing about an act of writing is often a matter of extrapolating backwards, and attempting ‘a coherent account of what is an often incoherent and mysterious process of creation.’

A waste of time?

I probably spent a good (in both senses) hour on these ten words, had an excellent discussion with some of my best writer friends, and have jumped what I hope is a useful and thought-provoking post off them. However, you won’t find them The Bruegel Boy: that whole episode got cut, in the interests of the novel as a whole.

Spending all that time, you might say, was a mistake. But (ETA) I’d disagree because even if that scene was cut:

1. I had a nice little writerly yoga workout, just as you do when you have to go back upstairs to fetch something you forgot: at least you got some steps in.

2. In thinking about why ‘collar’ was the right ending not ‘cap’ I understood a little more about my viewpoint character’s state in that scene, which fed into other scenes which did stay in the novel

3. And ultimately, it’s also because, as I’ve said before, creative work is inherently wasteful and we might as well accept that.

Indeed, as Grayson Perry would say, creativity is mistakes - and it’s in working through them to the right answer that we discover what the right answer is.

1. My first version of this point ended with ‘so often where the power of it is stored’. Which do you think is better?