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Enhancing Sentence Style

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Produção escrita em inglês I

Universidade Duke

4.6 (369 classificações) | 150K alunos inscritos

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

Visualizar o programa do curso

Habilidades que você aprenderá

Essay Writing, English Language, Academic Writing, Editing

Avaliações

4.6 (369 classificações)

5 stars
271 ratings
4 stars
67 ratings
3 stars
14 ratings
2 stars
4 ratings
1 star
13 ratings

LB

Jun 21, 2018

Helpful, informative, and engaging! I've always been at the top of my classes in English, but this is helping me sharpen my skills even more and apply them to my life.

PB

Apr 01, 2018

Hard work and worth it! Grateful for the opportunity. Fully recommend it for anyone who is serious about learning to write clearly and improve their prose.

Na lição

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.

Active and Passive Voice6:14

Enhancing Sentence Style8:23

Op-Ed Writing Workshop43:03

Ministrado por

Dr. Denise Comer
Assistant Professor of the Practice; Director of First-Year Writing

Transcrição

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.

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