WEBVTT

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Hello everybody and welcome to the Style Academy.

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We hope you'll find the videos and the exercises on this

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website really useful to you as you develop as a writer.

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This one is on writing sentences.

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Now, this may not be the best,

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news to some of you out there,

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but

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you are going to be a writer throughout your life,

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no matter what profession you go into.

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And you're going to be writing a lot of different kinds of documents.

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You're going to be writing emails;

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you're gonna be writing reports,

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analysis papers,

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blog posts,

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proposals,

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love letters.

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Who knows?

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But every time you sit down to write,

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you're going to be writing sentences.

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And

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you can't really improve your writing

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until you can improve the way that you write a sentence.

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And that's what this lesson is all about.

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As you already know,

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sentences like the one you see now can be pretty simple,

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or

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they can be not so simple at all.

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Here is a gargantuan sentence from Virginia Woolf,

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and she's famous for writing gargantuan and lovely sentences.

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What I want you to do now is something you may not do very often,

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which is

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pause this video and read this sentence out loud.

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You may feel kind of weird because you're in a library

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or maybe you're sitting in your dorm room or something.

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I don't know where you are,

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but wherever you are,

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pause this and read this out loud

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and just listen to the way that Virginia Woolf makes this sentence,

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and then when we come back,

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we'll talk a little bit about it just for two seconds.

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OK.

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So, what kind of sentence artist is Virginia Woolf?

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I noticed that she begins by saying,

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"considering how common illness is..."

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and she never completes her idea until the end of the sentence.

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Everything in the middle is building upon that,

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putting more and more weight

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on the sentence until the very ending when she says "it becomes strange indeed that..."

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And that's the whole point of the sentence.

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That's the main clause of the sentence if that language helps you.

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So, in using Virginia Woolf,

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I'm not saying that you need to write like Virginia Woolf,

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and maybe you don't want to write like Virginia Woolf.

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I don't want to write like Virginia Woolf.

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I enjoy her writing,

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but I want to create my own sentence style

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that has my own stamp and my own

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attitude and my own persona and all those things that come into writing sentences.

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And you should too.

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So, one of the cool things about sentences is that they come in all kinds of varieties,

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as you see here.

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Now, I'd like to do an exercise with you that kind of demonstrates this point.

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You see two sentences on the screen.

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Myka sang,

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It surprised her mother.

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What I'd like you to do

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is combine these two sentences to make one sentence.

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And I want you to do it in as many different ways as you possibly can.

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Let's shoot for at least ten—ten unique sentences

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that combine these two sentences together into one.

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And here are a few rules.

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I get this exercise from Max Morenberg in his book "Doing Grammar."

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So, you can change sang to singing,

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or you can add commas or dashes or colons.

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You can also add adverbs or adverbials like since or because or in the afternoon

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or something like that,

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but just don't change the essence of these two sentences.

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OK?

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Put the two together,

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switch the order if you want,

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and come up with at least ten,

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and then come back to me.

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How did that go?

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Did you come up with at least ten?

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As I was playing around with these two sentences,

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I came up with

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these.

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You may have some of these very sentences on your paper.

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So, as I was writing things,

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I was thinking that I was pretty much writing the same thing over and over again,

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but actually,

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even changing the form changes a little bit of the

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content or what the content is trying to say.

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Like these two examples.

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Myka's singing surprised her mother,

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and if Myka sings,

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it surprises her mother.

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Those are two sentences saying very similar things,

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but the meaning is just a little bit different.

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Another amazing aspect of sentences is that with all these different options,

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rhetorical tricks and combinations,

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you can write sentences that no one has ever

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written before in the history of the universe.

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You don't believe me?

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Let's try one right now.

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So,

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I'm gonna write the sentence.

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"This afternoon, while working on these keynote slides,

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I'm listening to Feist and wondering if my wife

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Amy will plant more lantana in the front yard."

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It's not a work of art,

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but my guess is that no one has ever written this sentence in the history of the world.

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And in fact,

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I proved it.

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I Googled this,

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and look,

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no results found.

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No one's ever written this sentence.

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So, what can learning to write sentences do for you?

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Well, it can add variety

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to your language.

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And let's get a little bit more specific about that.

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Let's go back to our sentence Ben laughed.

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You know,

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what makes a sentence effective and artistic and

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various

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is when you can build on something simple like Ben laughed.

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So, here's an example.

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In the afternoon,

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after his soccer game,

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Ben laughed.

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We're gonna call that a sentence opener,

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and I've sort of given you a

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little schematic of that with those dashes and then the X.

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It's like da da da da da and then the main clause,

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Ben laughed.

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Bam!

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But you can also have

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build on a sentence by adding a closer.

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Ben laughed, and root beer shot out his nose in a wild gush.

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I've heard that some people,

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some linguists would say that the

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English language and maybe language in general

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emerges kind of in this sentence closer pattern.

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This is often called right branching.

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You see,

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you've got Ben laughed as the main clause and then things branch to the right of that

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as opposed to to the left.

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So, this is kind of a sentence closer and, you know,

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you add variety,

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you can change it actually to

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what's called a participial phrase.

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Ben laughed,

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shooting root beer out his nose in a wild gush.

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And then if you wanna get really fancy pants,

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you can use a sentence interrupter.

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Ben,

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my oldest and by far silious child,

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laughed.

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You can see the schematic there with those X's how

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the clause is interrupted.

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There'll be more of this kind of stuff in other places in the style academy.

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So, one of the many advantages of learning how to write effective sentences is

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that you're putting phrases and clauses together in a variety of different ways.

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You'll also learn how to write clear.

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Writing effective sentences

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means often writing clear sentences.

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So, you connect with your readers,

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so they don't have to go

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through too much labor reading your stuff.

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It also gives you power,

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rhetorical power to convince and persuade other people.

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Heck, it might even make you happy learning how to write effective sentences.

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I don't know.

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But,

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when you learn how to begin with something as simple as Ben laughed,

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and then build it to something like this,

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and then something like this,

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you develop rhetorical power as a writer.

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Before we finish,

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let's do one last exercise.

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OK?

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Take a look at this sentence written by John Hersey in his book,

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Hiroshima.

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It's an account of when the United States dropped an atomic bomb

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on the Japanese city

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of Hiroshima.

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And just to let you know,

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if you look at the top,

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that first word,

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"non-hibakusha."

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Hibakusha means

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surviving victim of the atomic blast.

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What I want you to do here is take out a piece of paper or get a word processor humming,

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and I want you to just rewrite this sentence.

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Rewrite it exactly as it appears,

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word for word,

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comma for comma.

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Then, when you're finished,

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be prepared to talk to somebody about

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what you learned about this sentence just by

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copying it down.

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And in fact,

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it may seem crazy to you,

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but one of the more effective ways of improving your sentence writing

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is to imitate,

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to copy what another master writer has done,

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and that's what's happening here.

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One last note before you do that.

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I hope this lesson gave you some enthusiasm

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and some willpower to become a sentence artist,

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because that's what you are.

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You're a writer and writers write sentences.