This is a forum where students can discuss and evaluate literature, film and writing.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Improve Your Sentence Length
http://www.kristisiegel.com/variety.html Found a great short article on analyzing and improving sentence length. See if this helps you to improve your writing. Feel free to comment below on anything you have learned or would like to clarify.
4 comments:
mykaela
said...
Well, I'm still confused with the idea of short sentences...In the article it said that some short sentences are part of the varying process but I'm not very good at writing short sentences. For example, I thought we had to be very descriptive in our sentences, so I write very descriptivly, using long sentences. On the other hand, I also try to use short sentences for action but it sounds to plain like I'm skipping over details...Good article though...
I find it very interesting that writers have to focus on varying sentence length. I'd assumed it came naturally. But now I see that long sentences can be a little too wordy and monotonous, often repetitive. I admit to using longer sentences often. I've decided to focus on keeping my writing interesting with shorter sentences mixed in. (I thought it was really funny when it mentioned Hemingway. Good writer...)
Hemingway is one of my favorite writers and he is a captain of the school of writing sparse, short prose. He is someone to look to if you find yourself constantly writing 30 word sentences. Also, Mykaela mentioned that people need to write descriptively. The description doesn't change, the amount of words you give yourself per sentence to do it in is all that changes...great comments - H
1)Take an essay that represents your normal writing (e.g., one with a great deal of dialogue or an unusual amount of description could skew the results) and mark off twenty sentences. 2) Count the number of words in each sentence and then add those totals to get a grandtotal. 3) Divide the grandtotal by 20. Your result will be the average number of words per sentence.
4 comments:
Well, I'm still confused with the idea of short sentences...In the article it said that some short sentences are part of the varying process but I'm not very good at writing short sentences. For example, I thought we had to be very descriptive in our sentences, so I write very descriptivly, using long sentences. On the other hand, I also try to use short sentences for action but it sounds to plain like I'm skipping over details...Good article though...
I find it very interesting that writers have to focus on varying sentence length. I'd assumed it came naturally. But now I see that long sentences can be a little too wordy and monotonous, often repetitive. I admit to using longer sentences often. I've decided to focus on keeping my writing interesting with shorter sentences mixed in. (I thought it was really funny when it mentioned Hemingway. Good writer...)
Hemingway is one of my favorite writers and he is a captain of the school of writing sparse, short prose. He is someone to look to if you find yourself constantly writing 30 word sentences. Also, Mykaela mentioned that people need to write descriptively. The description doesn't change, the amount of words you give yourself per sentence to do it in is all that changes...great comments - H
wow! This section right here really helped me:
1)Take an essay that represents your normal writing (e.g., one with a great deal of dialogue or an unusual amount of description could skew the results) and mark off twenty sentences.
2) Count the number of words in each sentence and then add those totals to get a grandtotal.
3) Divide the grandtotal by 20. Your result will be the average number of words per sentence.
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