Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose by Hale Constance

Author:Hale, Constance [Hale, Constance]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780767908924
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2001-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

PART 2

Sentences

A sentence brings words together into a stream of thought. It lets fragments flow together and become complete ideas. It has direction, a current, momentum.

Much more than “everything between the capital letter and the period,” it tells who did what to whom. Consider the sentence a story, a mini-narrative, a yarn, with a beginning and an ending and a dramatic arc.

These principles will help to give your sentences energy:

RELISH EVERY WORD.

Sentences should be as varied as our objects of desire—sometimes we want them brawny, sometimes we want them brainy, sometimes silken, sometimes brutal. We don’t want them to stay the same, day after day.

Yet we’re so used to sound bites, to narrowcasting and net surfing, to teenagers bypassing whole paragraphs with “duh” or “whatever,” that we are tempted, in sentences, to the short and quick. But, remember, the imagination courses in unpredictable waves. As writers we must become intimate with the ferocity of simple sentences, as well as the gentle tumbling of phrases and clauses.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.