Transcript College Writing Sentence Structure Annie Dillard

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 structures
Simple sentences- short and
concise
Compound 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!