Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to ReadBased on the bestselling series from The Great Courses, Building Great Sentences celebrates the sheer joy of language—and will forever change the way you read and write. Great writing begins with the sentence. Whether it’s two words (“Jesus wept.”) or William Faulkner’s 1,287-word sentence in Absalom! Absalom!, sentences have the power to captivate, entertain, motivate, educate, and, most importantly, delight. Yet, the sentence-oriented approach to writing is too often overlooked in favor of bland economy. Building Great Sentences teaches you to write better sentences by luxuriating in the pleasures of language. Award-winning Professor Brooks Landon draws on examples from masters of long, elegant sentences—including Don DeLillo, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and Samuel Johnson—to reveal the mechanics of how language works on thoughts and emotions, providing the tools to write powerful, more effective sentences. |
Contents
A Sequence of Words 13 | 13 |
The Primacy of Propositions | 25 |
How Sentences Grow | 38 |
The Rhythm of Cumulative Syntax | 53 |
Coordinate Subordinate and Mixed | 68 |
Cumulative Tweaks and TightenUps | 94 |
Prompts of Comparison and Speculation | 118 |
The Riddle of Prose Rhythm | 140 |
Other editions - View all
Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read Brooks Landon No preview available - 2013 |
Common terms and phrases
anaphora balanced form balanced sentence base clause boxes of cookies chapter Christensen coordinate cumulative sentence craft created cumulative modifying phrase cumulative rhythm cumulative syntax dance describe Don DeLillo E. B. White epistrophe essay example explain final free modifiers Gertrude Stein gerund going Grammar Hemingway Here's idea important Joan Didion Josephine Miles kernel sentence kind language Lanham lative logical long sentences look master sentences meaning mind mixed cumulative move noun offers parallelism participle pattern periodic sentence phatic pleasure polysyndeton predicate prose rhythm prose style raised the flag reader reminds rhetorical second-level modifying phrases sense sequence of words serial constructions similes simply sound specific speculation steps strategies Strunk Strunk and White subordinate cumulative suggest suspensive sentences syntactic tence things Thomas Berger three-part series tion tive underlying propositions understand William Gass