Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon

Author:Brooks Landon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

Speculation Informs and Enriches!

My pitch is that adding speculation concerning the motives behind, the causes of, the interpretations of, or the consequences of the events or actions we write about helps forge the connection between reader and writer as two minds at work. Speculations introduced by words such as possibly or perhaps will not be appropriate in many writing situations, but knowing how well the cumulative syntax lends itself to speculative phrases introduced by these words may prompt us to consider whether or not to use them. After all, just knowing how easily we can add speculation to our writing may encourage us to put a bit more of the way we think into our writing, possibly forging a stronger relationship with a reader who appreciates our willingness to go beyond the “Just the facts, ma’am” literalness of Sgt. Joe Friday in Dragnet, signaling our readers that it is as important to wonder why and how things happen as it is to know what happens.

Here, of course, I’m thinking of writing situations where it is as important to present our judgment, our ability to interpret, our commitment to understanding as it is to present unprocessed information. In this advocacy for making cumulative-step speculation an option in our writing, I’m applying to writing the advice that Margaret Atwood gives us in her didactic short story “Happy Endings.” In that minimalist meditation on possible plots involving various relationships among briefly sketched lovers, Atwood urges readers to focus less on plots, which she describes as “just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what,” and instead: “Now try How and Why.” That’s great advice for writers as well, and in the cases when the how and why of a situation have not been and possibly cannot be determined, it frequently benefits the writer to move beyond the known to speculate about the likely or even just the possible.

Consider this sentence:

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