Are you a reader who values a writer's style as much as the meaning it conveys?

Are you a writer who seeks to refine your own style?

Would you like to improve your understanding of the techniques writers use to create beautiful sentences?

Welcome to the search for the perfect sentence!


Most readers and writers focus on the content of a piece--the ideas it conveys, the story it carries, the events it chronicles. "So many books, so little time" we readers chorus, rushing through our stories, newspapers, websites. "Is it finished?" we writers ask. "Have I written enough words? Have I gotten the content across?"

Here we'll focus on the style of writing more than its content. We'll slow down. We'll read very short passages, sometimes single sentences, and we'll savor their wordcraft. We'll examine why each word was chosen, how they were arranged into sentences, and how those sentences evoke our responses. In the process, I hope we'll become more careful, perceptive readers and more effective writers.

Beautiful writing is everywhere--on the sports page of the morning paper, in the novel that relaxes you at night, in your grandmother's love letters found in the attic. If you would like to contribute a passage for close reading, with or without your own interpretation of its techniques, please email me at jtarasovic@gmail.com.


Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Power of a Period

Here's a teenage girl musing on her resemblance to her mother, with whom she has an ambivalent relationship:

"[She] would turn out to be a woman of unobjectionable looks (trim enough, tall enough, with brown hair like her mother’s and brown eyes like her mother’s and pale, freckled skin. Like her mother’s)."

from Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Note the three repetitions of "like her mother's" and their punctuation. The first two are integral parts of the sentence; there's nothing about them to draw much attention. It's the third one, set off as a separate sentence, that illuminates the narrator's feelings toward her mother. Can't you just hear the teenage gnashing of teeth as she's forced to admit that in still another way, she's like her mother? Had the third phrase not broken the pattern, we would not sense the narrator's dismay. One little stylistic choice has conveyed the deeper truth.
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