Chris reminded me of something today that I always thought was interesting.
Remember the basic Dramatica quad? Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire - (which can be represented by Mass, Energy, Space, and Time, etc.) Well, you can also examine the structure of sentence in the same way.
Again, as usual, this is a narrow left minded way of looking at sentence structure. That’s where I’m predominantly based, so I tend to like to break things up into pieces. I’m not even sure how I would start describing it from a Female Mental Sex perspective.
So if you take the four basic elements of a sentence - nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs - you can quite easily fit them into the Dramatica quad. Nouns are the mass of a sentence and verbs represent the energy.
Adverbs and adjectives are modifiers of nouns and verbs - or Companion pairs. (See that link above again if you don’t know what companion pairs are). Adjectives are a companion to nouns - they describe the spatial differences between words. Adverbs are a companion to verbs and help modify verbs in a time sense. Quickly, suddenly, quietly - these feel time based. Whereas smelly, bulbous, and shiny feel more space based.
Not sure what practical application it has except that it’s cool!
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4 responses so far ↓
1 Jody Perkins // Jul 22, 2005 at 8:52 am
I agree, Dramatica sentence structure is cool! As to its practical application, it may provide a theoretical justification for effective writing guidelines that are grammar-based. Offhand, I can think of three such sets of guidelines.
The first set, described in Harry Noden’s book, “Image Grammar” (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999), provides interesting parallels with the ideas of nouns as mass and verbs as energy. From Noden’s book, p. 29: “In a reader’s imagination, nouns flash slide shows of still images, but verbs project motion pictures. . . . Professional writers choose verbs to drive their images . . . ” Noden’s book provides helpful guidelines for writing (actually, for teaching writing to 8th graders) with these thoughts in mind.
If Noden’s approach has a parallel with Dramatica’s view of nouns and verbs on the sentence level, Joseph Williams’s writing guidelines may have a parallel in the ways writers can effectively control the “flow” from one sentence to another. Williams, in his book “Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace,” 6th ed. (New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, Inc., 2000), focuses on how to carefully choose subject nouns (”topics”) and on how to manage emphasis. He shows how to manage emphasis by carefully controlling what kinds of material is put at the beginnings of sentences (that is, before the verb) and what kind is put at the end. Here is a quote from p. 124: “Just as you look at the first few words of a sentence to evaluate its topical coherence, look at the last few words of your sentences to see whether you have in fact ended them on the words and phrases that deserve the most rhetorical emphasis.” Williams’s approach can help clarify muddy paragraphs of individual sentences that make perfect sense individually. The parallel with Dramatica may lie at least partly in that narrative clarity — if writers carefully choose topic nouns, and put those nouns as well as verbs in the best places, readers may picture each of the writer’s intended images clearly, in an order that makes sense, like the well-ordered flow of mass and energy in a film.
The third set of guidelines isn’t really a set — it’s just the one often-repeated piece of advice not to use a lot of adverbs in your writing. Dramatica points out that adverbs feel time-based. Perhaps the problem with using adverbs is that as they describe, they also emphasize the transitory nature of movement (i.e., verbs or energy). And this emphasis on the transitory can make a description written with an adverb feel less substantial, less vivid, than it would if written with a noun or verb or adjective.
These are just some initial thoughts. Noden, Williams, and others may provide additional links between Dramatica’s sentence structure and practical writing ideas.
Thank you so much, Jim, for providing such an interesting and informative site!
2 Chris Huntley // Jul 28, 2005 at 2:53 pm
Jody, your citations and familiarity with grammar are terrific. Great post!
3 Jim // Jul 28, 2005 at 3:03 pm
I second that - somehow this comment got by me - thanks so much for your insights.
4 Kristoffer Ang // Aug 1, 2005 at 6:04 pm
Jim,
I’d love to hear more about this stuff. And if you’re asking for applications, I have one that really needs this.
e-mail me.
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