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.


Thursday, March 4, 2010

Glints in the Sand

Reading Phyllis Theroux's The Journal Keeper feels like strolling along a beach, my breath slowing as I take in the horizon, my skin warmed by the sun. Every once in awhile something glistens in the sand ahead or pricks my bare foot. I stop to look more closely and find a shell or a stone whose beauty I'd almost missed. I  slide it into my pocket to take home for closer examination.

"What I continually fail to note," she writes, "...is the heart-breaking, light-filled brilliance of the world I swim through like an unappreciative fish every day. Let the record show that I am grateful." 

Looking at these sentences under my desk lamp, I see--no, I hear-- that it's not just the reminder to see the beauty around us that captures my attention. It's the repeated vowel sounds--assonance again--humming their melody under the words: filled and brilliance; swim, unappreciative and fish. Who knew that the syllable prec could ever rhyme with fish?

In the paragraph preceding this passage, Theroux quotes another writer and notes that "It is the phrase tender attention that moves my imagination." What a lovely phrase. I wonder if her own use of assonance in her next sentence was conscious imitation or not. It doesn't really matter; what matters is that she got my tender attention.
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