Writing Sentences

Hello everybody and welcome to the Style Academy.

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

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

This one is on writing sentences.

Now, this may not be the best,

news to some of you out there,

but

you are going to be a writer throughout your life,

no matter what profession you go into.

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

You're going to be writing emails;

you're gonna be writing reports,

analysis papers,

blog posts,

proposals,

love letters.

Who knows?

But every time you sit down to write,

you're going to be writing sentences.

And

you can't really improve your writing

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

And that's what this lesson is all about.

As you already know,

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

or

they can be not so simple at all.

Here is a gargantuan sentence from Virginia Woolf,

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

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

which is

pause this video and read this sentence out loud.

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

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

I don't know where you are,

but wherever you are,

pause this and read this out loud

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

and then when we come back,

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

OK.

So, what kind of sentence artist is Virginia Woolf?

I noticed that she begins by saying,

"considering how common illness is..."

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

Everything in the middle is building upon that,

putting more and more weight

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

And that's the whole point of the sentence.

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

So, in using Virginia Woolf,

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

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

I don't want to write like Virginia Woolf.

I enjoy her writing,

but I want to create my own sentence style

that has my own stamp and my own

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

And you should too.

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

as you see here.

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

You see two sentences on the screen.

Myka sang,

it's surprise to her mother.

What I'd like you to do

is combine these two sentences to make one sentence.

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

Let's shoot for at least 1010 unique sentences

that combine these two sentences together into one.

And here are a few rules.

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

So,

you can change sang to singing,

or you can add commas or dashes or colons.

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

or something like that,

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

OK?

Put the two together,

switch the order if you want,

and come up with at least 10,

and then come back to me.

How did that go?

Did you come up with at least 10?

as I was playing around with these two sentences,

I came up with

these.

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

So,

as I was writing things,

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

but actually,

even changing the form changes a little bit of the

content or what the content is trying to say.

Like these two examples.

Micah's singing surprised her mother,

and if Mica sings,

it surprises her mother.

Those are two sentences saying very similar things,

but the meaning is just a little bit different.

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

rhetorical tricks and combinations,

you can write sentences that no one has ever

written before in the history of the universe.

You don't believe me?

Let's try one right now.

So,

I'm gonna write the sentence.

This afternoon while working on these keynote slides,

I'm listening to Feist and wondering if my wife

Amy will plant more lantana in the front yard.

It's not a work of art,

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

And in fact,

I proved it.

I Googled this,

and look,

no results found.

No one's ever written this sentence.

So what can learning to write sentences do for you?

Well,

it can add variety

to your language.

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

Let's go back to our sentence Ben laughed.

You know,

what makes a sentence effective and artistic and,

various.

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

So here's an example.

In the afternoon,

after his soccer game,

Ben laughed.

We're gonna call that a sentence opener,

and I've sort of given you a,

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

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

Ben laughed,

bam.

But you can also have

build on a on a sentence by adding a closer.

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

I've heard that some people,

some linguists would say that the,

the English language and maybe language in general

emerges kind of in this sentence closer pattern.

This is often called right branching.

You see,

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

as opposed to to the left.

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

you add variety,

you can change it actually to

what's called a participial phrase.

Ben laughed,

shooting root beer out his nose in a wild gush.

And then if you wanna get really fancy pants,

you can use a sentence interrupter.

Ben,

my oldest and by far silious child,

laughed.

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

this the clause is interrupted.

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

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

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

You'll also learn how to write clear.

Writing effective sentences

means often writing clear sentences.

So you connect with your readers,

so they don't have to go

through too much labor reading your stuff.

It also gives you power,

rhetorical power to convince and persuade other people.

Heck,

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

I don't know.

But

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

and then build it to something like this,

And then something like this.

You develop rhetorical power as a writer.

Before we finish,

let's do one last exercise,

OK?

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

Hiroshima.

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

on the Japanese city

of Hiroshima.

And just to let you know,

if you look at the top,

that first word,

non-ibakusha.

Hibausha is

umans surviving victim of the atomic blast.

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

and I want you to just rewrite this sentence,

rewrite it exactly as it appears,

word for word,

comma for comma.

Then when you're finished,

be prepared to talk to somebody about

what you learned about this sentence just by

copying it down.

And in fact,

it may seem crazy to you,

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

is to imitate,

to copy what another master writer has done,

and that's what's happening here.

One last note before you do that.

I hope this lesson gave you some enthusiasm

and some willpower to become a sentence artist,

because that's what you are.

You're a writer and writers write sentences.