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.


Friday, July 22, 2011

Stunning Sentences

I've discovered a little gem of a book that I recommend to any writer working on sentence craft. Stunning Sentences (Norton, 1999), one of a series on writing and editing by Bruce Ross-Larson, packs an entire course on style into 100 pages. There's little theory or rule-based grammar here; Ross does what I do--he finds effective sentences and shows what the writer has done to make them work. His examples come from journalism and business, where readers expect not pretty metaphors but hard information and expert opinion efficiently articulated. 

Writers can probably benefit most by taking small, regular bites from this book. Nine chapters cover broad syntactical techniques for improving sentences--Dramatic Flourishes and Elegant Repetitions, e.g--further broken into specific writing devices. I've admired many of these techniques before, but often with a vague, holistic appreciation; I can't always parse out exactly what a writer is doing that I might be able to add to my bag of tricks. Ross-Larson catalogues, defines, and illustrates rhetorical devices with perfect lucidity. Discussion is brief and concise, and examples abound. Here are a few of my favorites:

Inversion of conventional sentence order "to shift a word or group of words to the emphatic opening slot and to add cadence":
    Only in the virtual world of her fiction could Austen assert control. (Kevin Barry)

Repetition, here of prepositions:
    She has an instinctive politician's gift of connecting--to women, to men, to old people, to teenagers, to the guy in the Staten Island deli who took her order the other weekend after she finished a five-mile run. (Eisabeth Bumiller)  (And isn't the length of the final prep phrase, after the other short ones, perfect?)

Pairs or trios of short sentences:
   Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. (Vladimir Nabokov)

Ross-Larson's work is now part of Clearwriter, an online writing and editing service. After briefly sampling one of the online classes, I suggest you save a lot of money the old-fashioned way: just buy this little book on amazon. (OMG. I just called amazon old-fashioned because it sells actual books!)  

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