Transcript Sentences: Patterns of Expression By Jessica Lasorsa, Hillary Steele, Dan Sairsingh, Gabriella Gentile,

Sentences: Patterns
of Expression
By Jessica Lasorsa, Hillary Steele,
Dan Sairsingh, Gabriella Gentile,
David Guiertin, and Wyatt Davis
Expanding and Combining Sentences:
Building off the basic sentence
• Sentence Modifiers!
• Mary couldn’t see because she was
wearing an eye patch.
Expanding Sentences by
Modification
• Modifiers add detail to enrich sentences
and hold the reader’s interest
• Effective Modifiers!
• Not tacked on as afterthoughts
• Grounded in observation or experience
– Ex: I am uncomfortable in my doctor’s
office…
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)
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, don’t do it.”
(Eric Lax)
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
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.
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
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
Ways to Eliminate Wordiness
• Plan your essay before you begin
writing
• Revise your paper
• Delete useless words
• Substitute more economical
solutions for wordy ones
Cumulative Sentences
QuickTi me™ and a
TIFF ( Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see thi s pi ctur e.
• 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.
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.
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.
Climactic Order!
•Climactic word order
achieves emphasis by
building to a major idea.
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?
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.
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.
Before...
• Maxwell Perkins was born in 1884 and died in
1947. He worked for Charles Scribner’s Sons for
thirty-seven years. He was the head editor for
Scribner’s 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.
After...
• Maxwell Perkins (1884-1947), head editor of
Charles Scribner’s 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.
Three Pieces of Advice on
Sentence Variety
• 1. Don’t 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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