Learn more about communication with this collection
Conflict resolution
Motivating and inspiring others
Delegation
Keeping a reader's attention
If sentences have enough life and interest in them, they will hold the reader's attention as it moves along.
A good lesson for any writer is to make each sentence worth reading, leading the reader to the following sentence. Write not only in sentences but write with sentences.
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What celebrated writers can teach us
George Orwell thought a good sentence means trimming as many words as possible, Virginia Woolf found power in verbs, and Baldwin desired 'a sentence as clean as a bone.'
We can learn from celebrated writers that a good sentence is plain, undecorated and visible. It gets its power ...
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Joining separate thoughts
Many contemporary writers treat sentences as separate thoughts, then joins them with strong comparisons or contrast. This makes the sentences at the start and end of paragraphs vital.
You can change the entire tone of a sentence by shifting it from the end of a par...
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Sentences have become less shackled
Contemporary writers leave space and silence between their sentences. It helps the reader see the full stop. Sentences are not chained together like in the past.
Sentences written a few hundred years ago often started with a whereof or a howsobeit, to con...
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421 reads
It's all in the verbs
Verbs go beyond the "formal railway line of sentence" to help people "feel or think or dream", wrote Virginia Woolf. During the second world war, she wrote this sentence in her diary: "Thinking is my fighting." Apart from the possessive pronoun, it cons...
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A sentence is more than its meaning
A sentence is a living line of words with sense and sound. Beginner writers are often preoccupied with what they are trying to say and less about how that something looks and sounds. They focus on content and forget about
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Other curated ideas on this topic:
The most important sentence in any writing: the first one
- If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your work is dead. Of such a progression of sentences, each tugging the reader forward until he is hooked, a writer constructs that fateful unit, the “lead.”
- Do not count on the reader to st...
The Vertical Relationship
The vertical relationship serves marvelously to help capture the reader's attention. It permits you to set up a question/answer dialogue that will pull him with great interest through your reasoning.
What you put into each box in the pyranmi...
Kurt Vonnegut: How to write a good short story
- Use the time of a total stranger in a way that they won't feel it was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character to root for.
- Every character should want something, even just a glass of water.
- Every sentence m...
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