About split sentences

    Nobody wants a writer to lose their voice in the edit, but there are several things to consider in a sentence with a comma in its middle. The sentence that I just wrote is a loose sentence in Strunk and White's view in The Elements of Style (page 25), because it's connected with a conjunction (but) and a comma. Get enough of these in a short stretch and you run the risk of letting the reader's focus drift. The best alternative for the comma-conjunction (such as ", and") is to break the sentence into two, or use a stronger break such as a long dash, or a colon or semicolon.
    It's a simple survey on your rewrite: just search for ", and." Some are fine, but too many of them will give you a chance to tighten the reader's focus.

Simple language leads to perfect stories

It's easy to find praise for simple things in life. But writing seems to evoke the opposite effect in building sentences, paragraphs, sections and stories. We want to be noticed with our writing. However, if you look underneath that wish you should find the desire to be heard and remembered. Simple language delivers those two results. Simple lets the story rule the reader's attention.

Last night in our weekly Writer's Workshop we enjoyed Blackberries, a simple short story that our member Kathleen Clark showed me over our summer break. The Leslie Norris sudden fiction story -- another name for a short-short, under 1,000 words -- has few sentences that run beyond 15 words. Despite the brevity, the language is rich in feeling and detail. Here's one of the few, written about a blackberry vine.

His father showed him a bramble, hard with thorns, its leaves just beginning to color into autumn, its long runners dry and brittle on the grass.

Just count the verbs to see why this sentence works so simply. Show. Hard. Color. Even the adjectives are doing verb work, like dry, or waxing specific with an action, like brittle. The nouns swing into action: bramble, thorns, leaves, runners, grass. Of 26 words, 10 breathe simple life into this writing. (Kathleen called the story "perfect." I struggle to find any reason to disagree.)

Blackberries, like many other stories in Sudden Fiction International, runs on three main characters and two minor players across the space of four printed pages. The writing doesn't shy away from using variations of the verb "to be" in various tenses. Norris considers that advice, of using better verbs than be or were, but uses these simplest verbs along with others. Much of the simplest writing does.

Show spunk about the sentence

Out on the Writer's Digest Web site this week, an article on grammar boils down the writing of a good sentence to four commandments. Bonnie Trenga advises us about what we should, and more often should not, do:

1. You shall not write passively.
2. You shall not overuse weak verbs like “to be” and “to have.”
3. You shall not fluff.
4. You shall make every word necessary.

They are so fundamental that we need to know them like our own faces in order to cast them off. See, breaking rules is part of writing, too. You're working inside rules like these four to be polite, so readers don't struggle to enjoy your writing.

A list of rules, though, can become a rutted road for a reader. You might have this experience if you watch TV on the reality channels and see one episode after another of house flipping shows. The hopeful but innocent flipper introduced. The stern advice from the host. The headstrong ignoring of said advice. The cheerful praise of finished flip work from Realtors, followed by grim assessments from the buyers during the open house.

Read enough such formula and you begin to long for something that tastes different. Learning how to differ is the advice you can read more about in Spunk and Bite, a good antidote for the writer who's lashed to Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.

Write something that follows these four commandments without fail. Then rewrite it so it bends, or even breaks one of the rules. See if you can create something unexpected but understandable. Know the rules, but break them when you can.

Oh, one more bit of advice: Set any intentions or guides like these in positive statements. The brain can only process affirmative statements. It throws away the word "not" or "don't." So,

1. Write in the active voice.
2. Select strong verbs to limit your use of “to be” and “to have.”
3. Choose the best word, the one understood easily and most accurate.
4. And yes, "You shall make every word necessary."

Writing great sentences

Francine Prose wrote a fine book about writing, Reading Like a Writer, which includes a chapter on Sentences. (Chapters are titled with names such as Words, Paragraphs, Narration, Character, Gesture, Dialogue, and more.) In her book she celebrates the sentence and crafting wonderful ones.

To talk about sentences is to have a conversation about something far more meaningful and personal to most authors than the questions they're most often asked, such as: Do you have a work schedule? Do you use a computer? Where do you get your ideas?

Prose goes on to show an example of what a writer can do while ignoring the advice of writing craft books. Not just any writer, but Virginia Woolf, writing in her essay, On Being Ill. Not just any sentence, but one 181 words long, which appears at the opening of the essay. (It's shown at left; just click on it show a full-sized, readable page). Woolf's sentence is something I share with our weekly workshop members during our eight-week sessions. "It's not the sentence's gigantism but rather its lucidity that makes it so worth studying and breaking down into its component parts," Prose writes.

A good sentence is the meat on the bones of good writing. Prose writes, regarding the revision of sentences

Writers need to ask themselves

• Is this the best word I can find?
• Is my meaning clear?
• Can a word or phrase be cut without sacrificing something essential?

Perhaps the most important question is, "Is this grammatical?" A novelist friend of mine compares the rules of grammar, punctuation and usage to a sort of old fashioned etiquette. He says that writing is like inviting someone to your house. The writer is the host, the reader the guest, and you, the writer, follow the etiquette because you want your readers to be more comfortable, especially is you're planning to serve them something they might not be expecting.

Prose adds that she revisits Strunk and White's The Elements of Style from time to time. But most craft books like this tell a writer what not to do. Learning from reading is a way to enter a new league of writing, once the fundamentals of grammar are in your toolkit. Literature shows us what kind of great sentences are possible to write.