Building Great Sentences - How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

Zusatztext “The most erudite! readable book anyone has ever written on the sentence.”— Adrian Blevins! associate professor of English! Colby College   “An Elements of Style for the prodigious! Building Great Sentences is a service to writers and a joy to read.”— R.M. Berry! professor! Florida State University Informationen zum Autor Dr. Brooks Landon is Herman J. and Eileen S. Schmidt Professor of English and Collegiate Fellow at The University of Iowa and Director of the University’s General Education Literature Program. He lives in Iowa. Klappentext Based 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. Introduction We live in a world of words. Digital media inundate us with language in a twenty-four/seven barrage never possible in the world of printer’s ink. Constant Web updates, blogs, e-mails, instant messaging, tweets, Facebook comments, and a cascade of electronic texts give us expanded opportunities to share our writing with others. Even in the age of Skype and FaceTime we continue to interact with others through writing. More and more it is important that we represent ourselves to the world through writing that is effective—clear, precise, satisfyingly informative writing that reveals the individuality and sophistication of our thinking. And we cannot be effective writers without writing effective sentences. Whatever the medium, print or digital, our basic unit of communication is the sentence. Good sentences are alive. We experience them in time, and we react to their unfolding as they twist and turn, challenging us, teasing us, surprising us, and sometimes boring or confusing us as we read them. This book will explore the ways we can make our sentences better. To accomplish that we need to understand how making our sentences longer or shorter can make them more effective, more informative, more satisfying. We need to understand how taking control of building and trimming our sentences can improve our writing. Our goals will be to learn about how sentences work, what they do, and how we can think and talk about them in ways that will help both our own writing and our understanding of prose style. We will stretch our sense of all the things a sentence can be or do. We will explore the mysterious concept of “style” to discover what style does and does not mean. This is a book in which we will dance with language, not a book in which we will trudge toward remedial correctness. Dancing with language can be a rowdy affair. We might wish this dance had the precision, rules, and predictability of a tango, but it probably has much more in common with freestyle dancing that is more spontaneous and more creative, open to new steps and encouraging the reinterpretation of old ones. When the writer dances with language, toes do sometimes get stepped on as rules are broken. Of course, in dancing, as in writing, we need some ideas of what the rules are before we can break them. Before this dancing metaphor runs away with me, however, I better start ta...

Product details

• Authors: Brooks Landon
• Publisher: Plume USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 25.06.2013
• EAN: 9780452298606
• ISBN: 978-0-452-29860-6
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 201 mm x 16 mm
• Series: Plume; Great Courses
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies