Thursday Tip: Repeating a structure

For the parts of sentences doing the same work—signaled by the conjunctions and, or, and but—repeating their grammatical structures adds balance and often picks up the cadence rather than smothers it.

Here’s an example from the New York Review of Books [and is implied, its omission adding to the rhythm of the sentence]:

White pine is too soft, he reasons, maple too sleek, oak too ordinary.

Repeating too before each adjective makes the list more memorable than anything varied structures or varied words would evoke.

Here’s another:

In my fantasy party we would support the interests of the poor and working classes, not the rich; the rights of animals and the environment would be fought for; and discrimination would be combated wherever we found it.

The reader will have trouble untangling the jumble. The original in The Economist had better structure and cadence:

In my fantasy party we would support the interests of the poor and working classes, not the rich; fight for the rights of animals and the environment; and combat discrimination wherever we found it.

The writer could have done even more to unify the rhythm:

In my fantasy party we would support the interests of the poor and working classes, not the rich; fight for the rights of animals and the environment, whether popular or not; and combat discrimination, wherever we found it.

In the original not the rich adds a phrase to the first element not shared by the others. Another solution would be to drop it:

In my fantasy party we would support the interests of the poor and working classes, fight for the rights of animals and the environment, and combat discrimination.

The choice is between a compact sentence and one that takes its time.

Given our preference for arranging series from short to long, we would recast the sentence this way:

In my fantasy party we would combat discrimination, support the interests of the poor and working classes, and fight for the rights of animals and the environment.