![]() TIP #2: Use Punctuation as an Invisible Guide for Readers In general, smoothing out your sentences will keep your readers turning pages. Another character may speak so elliptically that others will constantly misunderstand him. You may want to give a certain character bumpy, less grammatical speech patterns to reveal his or her background and personality. There’s always an exception to the rule, of course, and that exception is dialogue. After all, her niece and nephew, ages two and three, wouldn’t be toddlers for long. ![]() ![]() She’d wanted to attend the high school reunion a few months ago but had chosen instead to spend a week at the beach with her sister’s family. Did Beth have happy memories of their school days, Annie wondered? For her, they’d been some of the best days of her life. Beth, who’d won the 100-meter sprint thirty years ago, strode ahead. Cars stopped at the traffic light to let them cross. Annie and Beth followed their former track coach, a tall man, down the road and past several shops.She could have gone to the reunion a few months ago but he had decided not to in the end because she was going on holiday with her sister and her kids, her niece and nephew, who were aged two and three years. For Annie, they had truly been some of the best days of her life. She wondered whether she too had happy memories of their days at school. Annie remembered how her friend had always won the 100 meter sprint at school, over 30 years ago. Annie and Beth followed the tall man, their former track coach, down the road and past some shops and then they crossed over the street at some traffic lights where the cars stopped obediently for them to cross at their leisure though Beth quickly strode across with long steps.Here’s an example (disguised to protect the guilty): One of our goals as writers should be to smooth out our sentences so readers keep turning the pages. Bumps and potholes slow things down and create frustration. You can get where you’re going in a shorter time and with greater pleasure if the road is smooth. MY TOP FIVE TIPS FOR CRAFTING BETTER SENTENCES Does it matter how we string those words together? Yes, it does. But to move a book along, those words must be strung together into sentences that mean something. Words such as jubilant, agonize, ghoulish, and gloom create atmosphere and tone. Words all by themselves conjure up images and emotions. How many actual words are there in the English language? More than a million is the best guess. We also have foreign words we’ve adopted and sounds like aargh or eek. Why say, “She was really, really happy” when you could say “She was thrilled?” Why settle for “It was cold and raining hard,” when you could create atmosphere by writing “The rain fell in icy torrents?”įortunately, English speakers have lots of words to choose from: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections. We search for the perfect word, and we try to be precise. Expressing thoughts and feelings is what writers do. Female speaker I can say the odd word, but I can't string a sentence together yet.Words are the building blocks of language and the means by which humans express their thoughts and feelings.Female speaker I can say the odd word, but I can't string a sentence together yet.Robyn could barely think, let alone string coherent words together to form an answer.The writers could string words together like beads on a necklace.Never mind he can't string two sentences together - he'd never admit that. ![]() Around the middle he started to string the birdies together and there was no holding him then.Most importantly, the Net is not about computers or the fancy phone lines that string them together.But Walt wanted to do more than string short cartoons together.All you have to do is string them together.→ string → See Verb table Examples from the Corpus string together 2 to combine things in order to make something that is complete, good, useful etc They string together image after image until the documentary is completed. From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English string something ↔ together phrasal verb 1 string words/a sentence together LOGICAL to manage to say or write something that other people can understand He was so drunk he could hardly string two words together. ![]()
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