You will gain a foundation for college-level writing valuable for nearly any field. Students will learn how to read carefully, write effective arguments, understand the writing process, engage with others' ideas, cite accurately, and craft powerful prose. Course Learning Objectives • Summarize, analyze, question, and evaluate written and visual texts • Argue and support a position • Recognize audience and disciplinary expectations • Identify and use the stages of the writing process • Identify characteristics of effective prose • Apply proper citation practices • Discuss applying your writing knowledge to other writing occasions
Enhancing Sentence Style
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English Composition I
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从本节课中
Project 3: Op-Ed
This week, Professor Comer introduces the idea of public scholarship, how academic writing can be transformed for a broader public. Her guest, David Jarmul, will give an overview of how to write an op-ed. You will then have the opportunity to write your own.
与讲师见面
Dr. Denise ComerAssistant Professor of the Practice; Director of First-Year Writing
Thompson Writing Program
Hello. Today we're talking about enhancing
sentence style. There are many, many ways to enhance
sentence style. We're going to think about two ways in
particular and refer you to some resources that you can use to find other
ways to enhance your style. I also want to say that, that enhancing
sentence style should come towards the latter part of the writing process on a
project. Because while it might be just personally
edifying to enhance sentences early on in the drafting process in terms of the
writing project, if you spend time making a sentence really beautiful.
Then you end up deleting that sentence entirely or the whole paragraph entirely
because the idea didn't work within the writing project, then, then it's not as
time effective, I’ll say. So, so you always want to be thinking
about yourself as a writer, but in terms of enhancing sentence style this is what
I would call sort of polishing towards the end of a writing process on a
particular project. One way of enhancing your sentence style
is by aiming for variety in your sentences.
Variety comes in the form of length, structure, punctuation, ideas.
Anything you can do to vary your sentences, you want to try to avoid
lulling or falling into a pattern, or a a trend in your writing.
We all have certain kind of structures that we lean toward, but when you're in
the publishing stages of writing you want to try to vary that, that work so that
it's interesting and engaging for readers.
And that they're getting everything you say, right?
So sometimes the problem with patterns is that people don't look carefully enough,
right, when there's a pattern. So you want to kind of aim for variety.
A teacher of mine in graduate school, a writing teacher of mine said that the
secret to good writing is that good writing moves.
And I think what she meant in part Is that good writing has lots of this
variety, right? Moving from very abstract ideas to
concrete ideas, varying the kinds of punctuation you use, the sentence
structure, the length. Here's an example from Ed White in an
article he wrote called The Scoring of Writing Portfolios Phase 2.
and I think he does a really good job of illustrating Sentence variety in these
three sentences. I think it's three sentences here.
Okay. so let's read it and I'll, I'll point out
some of the way that he's incorporating her idea.
When a student introduces a portfolio with serious reflection about it, the
student is taking responsibility for the quality of the work.
The choices that were involved in the writing, and the learning that has
occurred or not occurred. It is a powerful metacognitive act,
thinking about thinking, that no other assessment device includes.
But one link in our own thinking about portfolios yet remains.
And that is the purpose of this paper, to connect the power of the reflective
letter to the actual scoring of portfolios.
And here, we have first, a, a dash there, at the end of a paragraph.
We have sentence that's about four lines long.
The next sentence is two lines long, the next sentence is closer to three lines
long. So you can see he's varying his length.
He's also got, instead of a dash at the end, in this sentence, he chooses to
include a dash here. In the third sentence, he includes a,
includes a colon. And every sentence begins differently,
right? It is a powerful, when a student, but one
link. So we have a lot of variety in these
sentences and I think that's what you might want to aim for in your own writing
to, to try to integrate some, some more variety.
Another way to enhance your sentence style is to think about verbs.
Verbs are so important, they really hold the action in a sentence, quite
literally. But then for readers, they really hold
the action in a sentence in terms of that's what readers, kind of, graft on
to. there are many, many verbs in the English
language. One of the most frequently used is, are
forms of the verb, to be. And I have no problem with the verb to
be, and in fact in the example we just looked at, I think Ed White started one
of his sentences using a form of, of the verb to be.
So it's not that you want to eliminate them entirely, but you want to think
about whether the choice to use, to be, is, is a choice that you're deliberately
making. And that is the best choice for that
particular sentence, or if there might be other more exciting, stronger verbs that
you could use. Here's an example, and then we'll go
through three other examples, to show you how you might want to weed out other
forms of the verb to be. The frequency with which writers use
forms of the verb, to be, is interesting to me.
And so here we have, is, is the verb here.
And yet, right after it, we have this great potential verb right there,
interest. So instead, you could have right after
that. And now our sentence has an exciting verb
in it. The frequency with which writers use
forms of the verb to be interests me. And I think that, that's using a verb
like interests instead of, of to be. Let's take a look at some other examples.
Vidra's article was an argument about the invasiveness of Kudzu.
Take a minute and, and see if you can, if you want to revise out the form of the
verb to be or if you want to leave it in. And if so, hmm, if you do want to revise
it out, how would you do so. Welcome back.
The way that I would revise this is to take out this, was an, and here we have,
right there, a possible verb, right? So I would say, Vidra's article argues
about the invasiveness of Kudzu. If I wanted to make it an even more
powerful sentence, what I might do is just say Vidra argues about the
invasiveness of Kudzu. I would probably want to revise this too,
to be more specific, like, because as a reader, I'm wondering what does she argue
about it? What does she say about it?
So, I would probably specify that too. But anyways, for the verbs Vidra argues
about the invasiveness of Kudzu. Here's another one.
The writers were asking how to enhance their sentence style.
Go ahead and try to see if you want to revise this and if so, how.
Here's my suggestion. The writers asked how to enhance their
sentence style. And right away, we moved from a form of
to be to a great verb called asked. Here's one final example.
There are many people who want to improve their writing.
Now, I will point out that constructions like this, there are, are very common
along with, it is, there were, that is. so, that might be one thing in particular
that you want to look for. But anyways, let's see how you might want
to revise this sentence to have a more powerful verb.
Welcome back. My, my way of revising would involve,
starting there, many people want to improve their writing.
And, and I would suggest that that's maybe a more powerful choice than, than
in this case, the form of the verb to be. So, go ahead and in your writing look for
moments where you use to be. You can do a Find function on your Word
processing program, where you look for words like are, is, were.
And then you can find those moments and then you can choose whether or not you
want to revise those out. Again, I'm not suggesting that you
eliminate every possible instance of to be.
It's fine to use it, just make a deliberate choice about whether you want
to use it or not.
