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.


Wednesday, July 24, 2013

A life in a few sentences

Unlike many readers, I love the piling-up of details. A series of short phrases can create a rhythm that pulls us  into the dance of the writing. Here Junot Diaz uses two such series to encapsulate the life a young girl hopes for (sent. 1) and the one she's had so far (sent. 3). It's a novel in four sentences.

 What exactly it was she wanted was never clear either: her own incredible life, yes, a handsome, wealthy husband, yes, beautiful children, yes, a woman’s body, without question. If I had to put it to words I’d say what she wanted, more than anything, was what she’d always wanted throughout her Lost Childhood: to escape. From what was easy to enumerate: the bakery, her school, dull-ass Baní, sharing a bed with her madre, the inability to buy the dresses she wanted, having to wait until fifteen to straighten her hair, the impossible expectations of La Inca, the fact that her long-gone parents had died when she was one, the whispers that Trujillo had done it, those first years of her life when she’d been an orphan, the horrible scars from that time, her own despised black skin. But where she wanted to escape to she could not tell you.
 from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The long, itemized series--what she wants and what she lives-- alternate with shorter, elegantly constructed noun clauses, three ribs forming a skeleton that supports the weight of the passage:

  • What exactly it was she wanted...
  • From what was easy...
  • But where she wanted to escape to...
When I started reading, I wasn't sure I liked Diaz's slangy, uninhibited style,  peppered with vulgarities in two languages. By the time I finished, I understood why he had won the Pulitzer--mostly for the gradually unfolding story of a family and a country, but also for his mastery of wordcraft.
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