When I was in Iraq I bought a bunch of stuff to keep my intellectual faculties going in the face of the not-particularly-challenging day-to-day work. One of the items I most enjoyed was Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences, which is a great little book consisting of a bunch of brief English compositional techniques combined with extensive quotes from English literature demonstrating each technique. For those of you with OOP backgrounds, Artful Sentences is like the Design Patterns of English composition.

I don’t normally enjoy books like this, but for some reason I found this one to be very enriching. It’s dense material, particularly if (like me) you’re not up on your parts of speech and English grammar lexicon, but if you have an English composition handbook nearby it’s not so bad. This week I happened to mention it to some coworkers, and they bought copies and also enjoyed it, which prompted me to go back and read some of it again. I stand in awe of Tufte’s command of English, and her ability to describe and select examples of the various compositional patterns in the book.