Sentences: Patterns of Expression

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Sentences Patterns of Expression
By Jessica Lasorsa, Hillary Steele, Dan
Sairsingh, Gabriella Gentile, David Guiertin,
and Wyatt Davis
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Expanding and Combining SentencesBuilding off
the basic sentence

• Sentence Modifiers!
• Mary couldnt see because she was wearing an eye
  patch.

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Expanding Sentences by Modification

• Modifiers add detail to enrich sentences and hold
  the readers interest
• Effective Modifiers!
• Not tacked on as afterthoughts
• Grounded in observation or experience
• Ex I am uncomfortable in my doctors office

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The Balanced Sentence

• consists of two coordinate but contrasting parts
  that are set off against each other
• Functions like a balancing scale
• Indicates a contrast in thought
• Often marked by a coordinating conjunction(but,
  or not, yet, and)
• e.g I came to bury Caesar,
• not to praise him.(Julius Caeser)

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Periodic Sentences

• Periodic sentence- builds to a climactic
  statement
• Located at the end of a sentence
• Used to maintain suspense by withholding a
  certain idea from the reader
• Comparable to the punch line of a joke
• e.g Just before I went away to college, my
  father took me aside as I had expected, and said,
  as I had not expected, Now, Son, if a strange
  woman comes up to you on a street corner and
  offers to take your watch around the corner and
  have it engraved, dont do it. (Eric Lax)

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Coordination

• Combining or joining similar elements into pairs
  or series. The can be combined by using a common
  subject or predicate and compounding the
  remaining elements
• Coordination helps compress sentence thoughts

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Parallel Structure

• When or more coordinate elements have the same
  form
• Parallel Sentence - when the parallelism is
  conspicuous
• Parallel elements may be a single words,
  phrases, clauses or sentences
• May act as subjects, objects, verbs, or adjective
  modifiers
• For elements in a pair or a series to be
  parallel, all members must have the same form and
  serve the same gramatical function.

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Subordination

• Reduces one sentence to a clause or to a phrase
  that becomes part of another sentence
• Using subordination can help a writer pack a
  great deal of information into a sentence and
  still emphasize what is most important
• Original Sentence We left work early. We had
  work to do.
• Revised Sentence We left early because we had
  work to do

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Economy

• Achieves an equivalence between the number of
  words used and the amount of meaning they convey
• Wordiness is a failure to achieve economy
• Decisions about economy should always be made in
  relation to the meaning and purpose

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Ways to Eliminate Wordiness

• Plan your essay before you begin writing
• Revise your paper
• Delete useless words
• Substitute more economical solutions for wordy
  ones

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Cumulative Sentences

• Also called loose sentences, a cumulative
  sentence structure is roughly the opposite of a
  periodic sentence structure.
• The limax or punchline is revealed immediately,
  and the remainder of the sentence consists of
  details and examples.

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Cumulative Sentences lack suspense.

• The main profound idea appears right at the
  beginning of the sentence. The rest of the
  sentence can tend to ramble on.
• For the omnipotent Dr. Dre, who drops albums on a
  frequent interval, the music business can prove
  to be a demanding and highly competitive game.

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Emphatic Word Order

• The greatest emphasis in the English language
  occurs at the beginning and end of a sentence.
• The fluff material should be placed mid-sentence.
• Seven billion lemurs leap leisurely, comforted
  under the shining warmth of the afternoon sun.

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Climactic Order!

• Climactic word order achieves emphasis by
  building to a major idea.

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Anticlimactic Order

• Near the end of his life, in the hopes of
  glimpsing the life we live from infancy to our
  last years, Paul Gauguin painted Where Do We Come
  From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?

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Climactic Order

• Paul Gauguin, near the end of his life, painted
  Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We
  Going? in the hopes of glimpsing the life we live
  from infancy to our last years.

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Revising For Variety

• Variety is a characteristic not of single
  sentences but of a succession of sentences, and
  it is best seen in a paragraph.
• Variety is achieved through
• modification
• coordination
• subordination
• changes in word order.

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Before...

• Maxwell Perkins was born in 1884 and died in
  1947. He worked for Charles Scribners Sons for
  thirty-seven years. He was the head editor for
  Scribners for the last twenty of those
  thirty-seven years. He was almost certainly the
  most important American editor in the first half
  of the twentieth century. He worked closely with
  Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest
  Hemingway. He also worked closely with a number
  of other well-known writers.

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After...

• Maxwell Perkins (1884-1947), head editor of
  Charles Scribners Sons for the last twenty of
  his thirty-seven years with the company, was
  almost certainly the most important American
  editor in the first half of the twentieth
  century. Among the many well-known writers with
  whom he worked closely were Thomas Wolfe, F.
  Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.

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Three Pieces of Advice on Sentence Variety

• 1. Dont overdo it
• 2. Postpone revising for variety until you have
  written your first draft
• 3. Be aware of the effect that sentence length
  has on your readers

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