1.3 Explore the skills 2
Read the following extract from the same novel by Jon McGregor where he describes a city at night. Explore how the writer has used unusual sentence structures for effect by answering the questions in the annotations.
So listen.
1 What is unusual about each of these three sentences? Do they have a subject?
Listen, and there is more to hear. The rattle of a dustbin lid knocked to the floor.
2
Is this a sentence? What do you notice about the listing?
The scrawl and scratch of two hackle-raised cats. The sudden thundercrash of bottles emptied into crates. 1 The slam-slam of car doors, the changing of gears, the hobbled clip-clop of a slow walk home. 2 The rippled roll of shutters pulled down on late-night cafes, a crackled voice crying street names for taxis, a loud scream that lingers and cracks into laughter, a bang that might just be an old car backfiring, a callbox calling out for an answer, a treeful of birds tricked into morning, a whistle and a shout and a broken glass, a blare of soft music and a blam of hard beats, a barking and yelling and singing and crying and it all swells up all the rumbles and crashes and bangings and slams, all the noise and the rush and the non-stop wonder of the song of the city you can hear if you listen the song 3 and it stops 4 in some rare and sacred dead time, sandwiched 5 between the late sleepers and the early risers, there is a miracle of silence. 6 Everything has stopped. 7
3 Is this a sentence? What effect is the writer trying to create through the use of syndetic listing? 4 Has the sentence finished yet? How does the structure here bring you up short? Does this change the pace? 5 What do you think is the importance of this word in relation to the structure of the sentence? 6 Look back at the whole sentence. Is it understandable in this context? How is additional impact created when the sentence stops? How does the sentence reflect the night itself? 7
What is the impact of the spacing and the simple sentence at the end? Why does this sentence become unusual in relation to the previous ones?
Key term syndetic list: uses a conjunction, most commonly ‘and’, within its list of items; an asyndetic list does not
Chapter 1: Key technical skills
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