Perfect Sentences Are Interesting, Let's Fold in Schemes and Tropes
Lesson 4 of "Who's got style?" Creating Perfect Sentences with Nina Schuyler
Welcome back, everyone!
We’ve reached the week to introduce the archaic terms schemes and tropes. Schemes and tropes both involve using language in an unusual way. A scheme is an artful deviation from the traditional order of words, and a trope is an artful deviation from the ordinary or principal signification of a word.
We caught a glimpse of schemes when we covered balance, series, assonance and alliteration. To remind you (and fill your ears with beauty)
You can hear the ‘s’ sing in this sentence by Maya Angelou from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings:
"Up the aisle, the moans and screams merged with the sickening smell of woolen black clothes worn in summer weather and green leaves wilting over yellow flowers."
You can feel the eloquence of this balanced sentence:
The boys at Columbia went to class and the boys in Harlem went to war, a reality not suspended for a friendly Saturday pickup game.
The Dutch House, Ann Patchett
Or the eloquence of this one:
That ease of hers, that ease which makes me jealous, it is born from our precise difference.
Mrs. S. by K. Patrick
Under the category of tropes, you’ll find similes, metaphors, and personification, to name a few.
He was sensitive to lives that had, beneath their surface, like a huge rock or shadow, a glory that would be discovered, that would rise one day to the light.
James Salter
The wind was rising again, live oaks conducting the storm with mossy arms.
Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
But there are many more schemes and tropes. I’ll focus on the most common ones, which you’ve seen and can now, after this lesson, identify and use in your writing.
Why bother? (a little push to continue reading)