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.