Absolutes/Participials/Appositives

A participal is the –ing form (present participal) or –ed form (past participle) of a verb tagged onto the beginning or end of a sentence.  Both participals and participial phrases add more details to a sentence.  Using single participles creates rapid movement, while expanded phrases add details at a slower, but equally intense pace.  In Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway uses participial phrases to create tension and action in this excerpt:

Shifting the weight of the line to his left shoulder and kneeling carefully, he washed his hand in the ocean and held it there, submerged, for more than a minute, watching the blood trail away and the steady movement off the water against his hand as the boat moved. (56-57)

An equally powerful structure that also adds to the action of an image is the absolute.  An absolute is a two-word combination—a noun and a participal added onto a sentence (there can also be a prepositional phrase tagged to the absolute).  Instead of saying “The cat climbed the tree,” you can add two absolutes to give it detail: “Claws digging, feet kicking, the cat climbed the tree.” 

A third technique, the appositive, provides another option, often used to amplify still images.  An appositive is a noun that adds a second image to a preceding noun.  Like the absolute, the appositive expands details in the reader’s imagination.  For example, by adding a second image to the noun raccoon in the sentence “The raccoon enjoys eating turtle eggs,” the writer can enhance the first image with a new perspective.  “The raccoon, a scavenger, enjoys turtle eggs.”  To expand and add more vivid details, writers frequently expand the appositive to an appositive phrase: “The raccoon, a midnight scavenger who roams lake shorelines in search of food, enjoys eating turtle eggs.”

Using absolutes, participals, and appositives, a writer can zoom up on any part of a picture that is already framed by the original sentence by using commas. “The rhapis palm sat in a large, white container.” In this example, that means zooming up on either the palm or the container.  For instance, assume the branches of the palm are the detail of interest.  Without any word of transition, only a twist of a zoom lens represented by a comma, the sentence can now read:  “The rhapsis palm sat in a large, white container, the branches stretching into the air.”  The writer can place a comma after “air” and zoom in on something framed in this part of the sentence. This time the zoom can only be on the branches or air because the “camera” has focused on them, cutting the general description of the palm and container out of the picture.  Suppose there is nothing of interest about the air, but the branches have interesting joints or nodes.  Zooming in on those, the sentence would now read: “The rhapsis palm sat in a large, white container, the branches stretching into the air, fibrous joints knuckling the otherwise smooth surface.”