Definition:
An independent clause followed by a series of subordinate constructions (phrases or clauses) that gather details about a person, place, event, or idea. See also:
- Cumulative Sentences in "The Falls" by George Saunders
- Running Style
- Loose Sentence
- Subordination
- Hypotaxis
- The Freight-Train Style
- The Running Style in Lewis Thomas's "On Cloning"
Examples and Observations:
- "I write this at a wide desk in a pine shed as I always do these recent years, in this life I pray will last, while the summer sun closes the sky to Orion and to all the other winter stars over my roof."
(Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, 1987) - "The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves."
(Joan Didion, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968) - The cumulative sentence is particularly good for setting a scene or for panning, as with a camera, a place or critical moment, a journey or a remembered life, in a way not dissimilar to the run-on. It is another kind of--potentially endless and half-wild--list. . . .
And here is this writer Kent Haruf, writing a cumulative sentence, opening his novel with it, panning the smalltown western landscape of his story:Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up. (Kent Haruf, Plainsong)
(Mark Tredinnick, Writing Well, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008)
Also Known As: cumulative style
