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Crafting Excellent Sentences and Paragraphs
How to organize and make your writing “flow”
Why craft is important:
“Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.”
~Stephen King,
On Writing p. 135
Sentence Basics
Subject + Verb = Sentences
It never fails.
Examples: Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Kittens create. Mountains float. Sunlight sparkles. She succeeds.
Sentence Length and Vocabulary
Varies.
Some writers have enormous vocabularies:“The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost
indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing’s form of organization and pertained to some paleogean cycle of invertabrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation.” -H.P.Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness”
Sentence Length and Vocabulary
Other writers use smaller, simpler vocabularies:“He came to the river. The river was there.”
-Ernest Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River”
“When I was ten, I feared my sister Megan.”-Stephen King,
“On Writing”
Paragraphs
Q: What is a paragraph?
A: “In college writing, paragraphs should address a specific topic or idea and develop that idea with examples and evidence.”
--Andrea A. Lunsford, The Everyday Writer, 4th edition
Describing an Idea
Describing an idea is a key aspect of crafting each of your paragraphs.
Explain the “self-explanatory”Supporting Claims with evidenceBE SPECIFIC!!!
It is much better to write about specific details than to use general, cliché words…there is no clarity in generalizations.
Describing an Idea
Thinking Involved in Descriptive Writing Knowing what you are describing Giving details and thorough explanations What is observable? Order and sequence (must be logical) Concrete details Painting a picture for someone who doesn’t know
you or your practice What’s the best way to describe it? Don’t assume that people will understand!!
Making Paragraphs “Flow”
“A paragraph has coherence--or flows--if its details fit together clearly in a way that readers can easily follow.”--Andrea A. Lunsford, The Everyday Writer,
4th edition
Making Paragraphs “Flow”
Organization without = your entire piece of writing
Organization within = using tools in the paragraph itself to achieve coherence
Transitions between paragraphs
Transitions within paragraphs, between sentences
Organizing Without
Chronology
General to specific
Complexity: less to more
Cause and effect
Problem, needs, solution
Process
Comparison and contrast
Organizing Within
Focus on one main idea (“topic sentence”)
Completely develop the ideaDefinitionExampleDescriptionComparison and contrastAnalogy, etc.
Genre Theory Basics
What is a “Genre”???Immersion in textNoticing Protocol
Conventions = the ingredients, characteristics, qualities of a genre that make it what it is
What moves do you see the writer making?Content, Form and Style
Practice!
Break into 3-4 Groups
Look at the sample text, and as a group, make a list of all the things you notice (conventions, writer-moves, etc.)
Once you have compiled your list, be ready to share your group’s findings with the rest of the class.
Reflection
Based on what we’ve learned and discussed in the workshop today, what strategies do you believe will be most helpful to you in crafting and organizing sentences and paragraphs?
