Combine simple sentences into compound sentences.

Mickey and I had nowhere to go. This man was chasing us.

“Mickey and I had nowhere to go, in our own neighborhood or out of it, but away from this man who was chasing us.” - Annie Dillard “The Chase”

Reject monotony!

Vary sentence structuresSimple sentences- short and

conciseCompound sentences- Combine

like ideas to avoid redundancy.Complex sentences- Use

sparingly. These are good for variety, but if you can say it with fewer words and preserve the same essential idea- please do!

Vary sentence beginnings.

Pay particular attention to how you begin your sentences.

Avoid verbs of being: “There is”, “There are”, “There was”…

Use those strong active verbs!

Sentence Beginnings

Don’t always begin with your subject:

Subject + verb + prepositional phrase.

Subject + verb + direct object

These patterns get a little boring over time.

Be specific not vague

Use nouns that are specific- not fish, but salmon, not fell, but plummeted.

Use a thesaurus, but do so hand in hand with a dictionary. Don’t use a word unless you are certain what is means and check your usage with an editor.

How could you liven up this passage?

There are many animals on the earth that seem to be exactly uniform in their appearance, from the great Pleistocene herds of the past to the bacteria found in human bodies.

Tinker at Pilgrim Creek by Annie Dillard

“The landscape of earth is dotted and smeared with masses of apparently identical individual animals, from the great Pleistocene herds that blanketed grasslands to the gluey globs of bacteria that clog the lobes of lungs.”

Liven up these sentences by enhancing the word choice (especially the verbs) and changing the grammatical structure (word order):

There were many people in the crowd.

It was extremely cold outside.

Parallelism

If you have two sentences with parallel meanings, then coordinate them through parallel sentence construction. Parallelism allows form to echo function.

Parallelism is like applesauce to pork.

Parallelism in your sentences will help make writing satisfying to the reader.

Famous sayings are remembered not only for their content, but for their symmetry.

Parallel construction is pleasing to the ear's palate:

"We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." -Ben Franklin

"Outside noisy, inside empty." -Chinese proverb

"A living dog is better than a dead lion." -Ecclesiastics

"Government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." -Lincoln

"Whether the knife falls on the melon or the melon on the knife, the melon suffers." -African proverb

“The Chase”

Parallelism can involve purposeful repetition:

“I started making an iceball- a perfect iceball, from perfectly white snow, perfectly spherical, and squeezed perfectly translucent so no snow remained all the way through.”

If variety is the “spice” in writing, why does this work?

“He chased us silently, block after block. He chased us silently over picket fences, through thorny hedges, between houses, around garbage cans, and across streets.”

Sometimes the parallelism is in structure and in words that play off of eachother in compelling ways

“He impelled us forward; we compelled him to follow our route.”

What punctuation do you note in this example? Why does this long sentence work?

The air was cold; every breath tore my throat. We kept running, block after block; we kept improvising, backyard after backyard, running a frantic course and choosing it simultaneously, failing always to find small places or hard places to show him down, and discovering always, exhilarated, dismayed, that only bare speed could save us- for he would never give up, this man, and we were losing speed.

Note how she uses commas, the dash, the semi-colon, and gerund phrases.

The air was cold; every breath tore my throat. We kept running, block after block; we kept improvising, backyard after backyard, running a frantic course and choosing it simultaneously, failing always to find small places or hard places to show him down, and discovering always, exhilarated, dismayed, that only bare speed could save us- for he would never give up, this man, and we were losing speed.

Journal Task

As a group, write a paragraph using paragraph 14 (page 101) in “The Chase” as a model. Follow the sentence structures in this paragraph as closely as you can. Try to mimic Dillard’s style.

Use parody only if your intent is to use a satirical tone Just like some music energizes us

with upbeat tones, while other songs provoke a contemplative mood, writing uses words to set tone.

Your tone should align with your purpose. An overuse of any literary style may set an inappropriate satirical tone. Use variety!