"The most emphatic place in a clause or sentence is the end. This is the climax; and, during the momentary pause that follows, that last word continues, as it were, to reverberate in the reader's mind. It has, in fact, the last word"
About this Quote
Lucas is quietly teaching power: not the power of big ideas, but the power of placement. By crowning the end of the sentence as "the climax", he treats syntax like stagecraft. The final word is a spotlight cue, the pause after it a kind of enforced silence in which the audience has no choice but to sit with what theyve been given. That little beat of stillness is where persuasion happens. You dont just read the last word; you hear it.
The subtext is a critic's impatience with sloppy prose and mushy thinking. Lucas implies that writers who squander the ending of a sentence are leaving money on the table: theyre failing to decide what matters most. Ending well is an act of judgment. Choose the right last word and you can turn a neutral statement into a verdict, a joke into a jab, an observation into an epitaph. Choose badly and your meaning leaks away.
Context matters, too. Lucas comes out of a tradition of English criticism that prized clarity and cadence over theoretical fog. He is writing in an era when modernist experimentation had made style newly visible and, for some, newly suspect. His move is to demystify rhetoric without downgrading it: the sentence is a unit of drama, and drama has physics. The final word has the last word because it gets the last silence.
The subtext is a critic's impatience with sloppy prose and mushy thinking. Lucas implies that writers who squander the ending of a sentence are leaving money on the table: theyre failing to decide what matters most. Ending well is an act of judgment. Choose the right last word and you can turn a neutral statement into a verdict, a joke into a jab, an observation into an epitaph. Choose badly and your meaning leaks away.
Context matters, too. Lucas comes out of a tradition of English criticism that prized clarity and cadence over theoretical fog. He is writing in an era when modernist experimentation had made style newly visible and, for some, newly suspect. His move is to demystify rhetoric without downgrading it: the sentence is a unit of drama, and drama has physics. The final word has the last word because it gets the last silence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by L. Lucas
Add to List
