How To Write a Good Sentence


““In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.”” - Geoffrey Cotterell, New York Journal-AmericanIf you want to be your best in business, you must be a good writer. By good, I don’t mean crafty or artful, but clear and persuasive. For our purposes, writing is a means to an end. The end is (1) the clear expression of an important idea or (2) persuasion. To do either well, you don’t need to have the literary sensitivity of a Cormack McCarthy, but you do need to do certain things, some of which I’ll talk about today.

Some of the following suggestions comes from Bruce Ross-Larson, founder of the American Writing Institute (not to be confused with the American Writers & Artists Institute) and author of Edit Yourself, a book I’ve recommended in the past. 

Writing Good Sentences

The Two Biggest Secrets Before you can write a persuasive memo or an effective sales letter, you must be capable of writing a good sentence. The first Golden Rule of sentence writing is to express one, and only one, idea in each sentence. (Ross-Larson allows for “two closely related ideas” in one sentence.) 

The second Golden Rule of sentence writing – and this one’s from me – is to make sure the idea you are expressing is a good one.

The mistakes made by not following these two rules are extremely common. They are responsible – I’ll bet – for 60% to 80% of bad writing. Not only are they proliferate, they are deadly. Break either of the Golden Rules of Sentence Writing and you are in trouble. Break both at once and you will make your reader wonder how smart you really are. 

Ross-Larson Identifies 5 Types of Sentences: 

1. Direct

The simplest and thus the clearest, the direct sentence has one main clause and is the starting point for countless variants. Example: Smart eateries are putting peculiar mushrooms on the menu. 

2. Embellished 

The first common variant to the direct sentence is to attach a phrase – at the beginning, middle, or end. Example: By all means, Alabama has made itself more like the rest of America. 

3. Complicated 

The second common variant to the direct sentence is to add a comment or definition by means of a “which” clause. Example: The book also suffers more than usual from Elshtain’s prose style, which is earnest at best and plodding at worst. 

4. Conditioned 

You can condition the main clause with another clause beginning with “when”, “if”, “because”, “since”, “as” and so on. Example: When Mr. Clinton toasts Mr.Jiang at the White House next week, there will be no shortage of critics to accuse him of supping with the devil. 

5. Multiplied 

Another variant is to combine the above structures and multiply their parts. Example: The number of men who consider working women to be worse mothers has dropped precipitously since 1970, but the number of women who think so has dropped far less sharply. 

Five techniques to Improve Your Sentences: 

1. Make your sentences short.

 Ross-Larson recommends that sentences not exceed 22 words (about two lines of print).

2. Vary length. 

Every third or fourth sentence should be short. It is acceptable nowadays to shorten sentences by using sentence fragments – partial sentences. Example: All the crusading doesn’t reassure the public. Just the opposite. Occasionally, it’s good to use extra-short and/or fragments to begin or end paragraphs. And you can string two or three short sentences together to create cadence. Example: Literature is invention. Fiction is faction. To carry a story line a true story is an insult to both art and truth. 

3. To give your sentences a quick stop-and-go, use the interruptive dash. 

Example: New York is a city ripe with extremes – of wealth and poverty, of creative energy and rage. 

4. Employ the imperative to grab attention. 

 Example: Trek to the tops of mountains, the sources of rivers, and the earth’s icebound poles.

5. Address your readers directly to make your message personal and compelling. 

Example: As a parent, you want to do everything possible to keep your children from experimenting with drugs. 

Taken from:
http://www.earlytorise.com/how-to-write-good-sentences-and-why-you-should/#

Kinds of Writing

You can download the file here

Basic Writing

You can download the file here

What is writing?

Writing is a method of representing language in visual or tactile form. Writing systems use sets of symbols to represent the sounds of speech, and may also have symbols for such things as punctuation and numerals.

Definitions of writing systems

Here are a number of ways to define writing systems:

a system of more or less permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more or less exactly without the intervention of the utterer.
From The World's Writing Systems

a set of visible or tactile signs used to represent units of language in a systematic way, with the purpose of recording messages which can be retrieved by everyone who knows the language in question and the rules by virtue of which its units are encoded in the writing system.
From the The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writings Systems

All writing systems use visible signs with the exception of the raised notation systems used by blind and visually impaired people, such as Braille and Moon. Hence the need to include tactile signs in the above definition.

In A History of Writing, Steven Roger Fischer argues that no one definition of writing can cover all the writing systems that exist and have ever existed. Instead he states that a 'complete writing' system should fullfill all the following criteria:

• it must have as its purpose communication;
• it must consist of artificial graphic marks on a durable or electronic surface;
• it must use marks that relate conventionally to articulate speech (the systematic arrangement of significant vocal sounds) or electronic programing in such a way that communication is achieved.

Writing systems are both functional, providing a visual way to represent language, and also symbolic, in that they represent cultures and peoples. In The writing systems of the world, Florian Coulmas describes them as follows:

As the most visible items of a language, scripts and orthographies are 'emotionally loaded', indicating as they do group loyalties and identities. Rather than being mere instruments of a practical nature, they are symbolic systems of great social significance which may, moreover, have profound effect on the social structure of a speech community.

Taken from: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/definition.htm 

HOW TO START WRITING 

Whether it’s for a school assignment or for a novel manuscript, everybody writes. For many people, however, writing often becomes a chore: time-consuming, demanding, and unsatisfactory. The problem is that most people don’t stop to think how to write. Just as there are steps to solving an algebraic equation, there are several steps that can be followed to produce a more satisfactory essay or story, some more obvious than others.

Perhaps the trickiest part of writing is figuring out how to begin. The first steps to writing – getting a concept, planning out a piece, and working out a draft – aren’t usually the most fun steps, but they are all often overlooked. Here are a few tips for starting your work quickly and without much hassle. 

First, decide what you actually want to write. Getting down the bare minimums for your piece will help you construct a bare draft for whatever it is you’re planning to end with. Either jot it off on a sticky note and put it next to your notebook, or write it on the top of your Word document. 

How long is whatever you’re trying to write? What are you writing about? Are there any other requirements you have to worry about? While you might know exactly what you need before you start to write, putting it down is a good way to focus your mind on exactly what you need to accomplish. 

Make sure you’re interested in what you’re writing. If you aren’t fascinated with the subject you’re writing about, it will almost certainly show in your writing. If you don’t have a choice as to what to write about, try to find some element in your subject that interests you, and focus on it. If you’re just writing to finish whatever it is you’re supposed to write, getting yourself to write it will take much longer than if you take just a little time to get yourself interested. 

Outline the basics of what you’re trying to get done. The most monotonous example of this, of course, is the five-paragraph essay most high schoolers are forced to learn about. While an overly-forced rubric can lead to an unoriginal paper, some structure can only help with your quickly jotting out a draft, which is the most important part of writing. If you have five pages to fill on a paper, decide how long you will write about each different point you have to make. Outlining also helps with creative writing: even though creativity can’t be forced, it helps immensely to have a general idea of what’s going on in your story. Just look at Harry Potter, which concluded last month: the final book had strong ties with the six before it, even though it was written a full decade after the original book. Without some sense of direction, J. K. Rowling would never have been able to create such a powerful conclusion. 

Stop everything else and concentrate on writing. The draft of any piece is almost always the hardest thing to write, since you have nothing to base your writing on. While you’re writing your draft, try to concentrate on it as much as possible. Turn off your instant messenger, if you have one on. Don’t take a break to check your email. Any interruption might destroy your focus on your piece, and it is far harder to return to writing a draft than it is to write it all in one go. 

If your piece is a long one, this might not be entirely possible. Still, try to set aside at least an hour at a time when you’re trying to write, so you can get into the flow of your writing. Lower your standards. Writer’s block really originates from high standards: often, you will sit down to write but not like what you’re producing. The trick of eliminating this? Stop worrying so much over whether or not every little bit you write is a good as it can be. 

Either way, you are probably going to have to return to your draft several times an revise it: don’t attempt to revise every line as you write it. If you have a section you think is of a particularly low quality, make a note of it, but keep writing. Revision is when you’ll go back and fix all the errors you’ve written. The draft is just your chance to write quickly and get the foundations of your piece over with. 

Take your time before revising. You won’t be able to assess your piece immediately after you’ve written it: give yourself time before looking over your work. Read a book, talk to friends, perhaps exercise… just make sure that when you go back to read over your draft, you’re in a different mindset than you were when you were first writing. If you spend too much time looking at your work, you won’t be able to revise objectively. There’s no rush to finishing your work after you’ve begun: just take your time and you’ll be far more able to produce a quality piece of work. 

Taken from: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/six-ways-to-start-the-writing-process.html

THE IMPORTANCE OF WRITING SKILL

When we talk about writing, we often wondering why writing is really important among the others skill. here is the link if you want to know why does writing is really important. check this following link!!!

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/why-are-writing-skills-important.html