Grammar as Style

Grammar 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.