The Well-Crafted Sentence: Richard White in "Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill"

"Like his academic peers, Turner used no visual images to illustrate either the talks he gave or the academic articles he wrote. Instead, he relied on an almost painterly prose that evoked similar scenes of migration, primitive beginnings, and ultimate progress. Americans already thought in terms of great achievements from primitive beginnings; Americans already thought of themselves as egalitarian and democratic. They had already symbolized such beliefs in imgaes of log cabins and migration into a land of opportunity, and had tunred those images into icons. Turner used the icons" (13).

In this essay about Frederick Jackson's Turner turn of the century definition of the frontier, Richard White describes the famous historian's style in prose marked by active voice, a plethora of verbs, clear parallelism, and an effective deployment of a semicolon.

Verbs abound: "used," "gave," "wrote," "relied," "evoked," "thought," "symbolized," and "turned." After the transitional "instead," followed by a comma (introductory element rule), the parallelism that concludes this sentence provides a concise list of three elements presented in equivalent grammatical form: "scenes of migration, primitive beginnings, and ultimate progress."

In the third sentence, the parallelism works on the a larger scale--on the level of the independent clauses--as White links two independent clauses that begin with the same three words ("Americans already thought") with a semicolon (IC; IC.). Here, the writer reminds us of the value of a semicolon employed to underscore a connection between the ideas of two independent clauses. Yes, White could have separated the clauses with a period (IC. IC.) or with a comma and coordinating conjunction [IC, (fanboys) IC.], but he rightly chose the semicolon to emphasize the close relationship between the values to which Americans attached themselves in the two clauses.

Comments

[welfbrearddag]

Thank you for the article! I hope the author does not mind if I use it for their course.
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