The NY Times recently started Draft, an online series “about the art and craft of writing.” The second post in the series is by author and journalist Constance Hale. She writes about the art of constructing sentences in her opinion piece, "The Sentence as a Miniature Narrative".
Analogizing sentences to boats, Hale writes that we need to expand our thinking about sentence construction from the grade school definition of a sentence, “It begins with a capital letter, ends with a period and expresses a complete thought.” She implores writers to focus on sentence structure saying, “Nouns give us sentence subjects — our boat hulls. Verbs give us predicates — the forward momentum, the twists and turns, the abrupt stops.” This analogy provides an interesting and helpful visual for the different functions of a subject and predicate.
She offers this tip, “Think of the predicate as a predicament — the situation the subject is in. I like to think of the whole sentence as a mini-narrative. It features a protagonist (the subject) and some sort of drama (the predicate): The searchlight sweeps. Harvey keeps on keeping on. The drama makes us pay attention.”
How can you compose your own compelling, drama-filled mini-narratives? Hale suggests writers practice their subject and predicate agreement by substituting subjects and predicates into famous first lines from novels. She also offers that creating your own epitaph can be a fun writing exercise to practice sentence construction.
While there is certainly more to crafting a great sentence than just the subject and predicate, fully understanding the foundation of sentence structure is step one on the path to great writing.
Read the full article here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/the-sentence-as-a-miniature-narrative/.
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