Syntax
Syntax
Excerpt from English Language and CompositionÂ
While diction refers to the selection of individual words, syntax refers to the grouping and arranging of words into clauses, sentences, and paragraphs.
The way a writer chooses to group words, like the specific words the writer chooses, influences how likely the audience will be to accept or reject the argument.
Consider this excerpt from Joan Didion's essay "Why I Write," which provides some context for her idea of writing as an act of bullying.
Writing is an aggressive, even hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions-with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating-but there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.
The excerpt above consists of just two sentences: one short and one very long. The short first sentence grabs the reader's attention with a declarative statement that signals the reader to ask why or in what way writing is an aggressive, even hostile act. The second sentence vividly supplies the answer.
It also subtly supplies humor in that its form follows its function; at the same time Didion is describing the "veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives," she is creating those structures in the essay itself. At the same time she is saying that writers evade and allude rather than making direct statements, she provides an example of a writer-herself-doing just that.