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- Marcus, on my top 10 are the daily devotionals. I love getting those from you in the morning, always a thought provoking insight that challenges me to go deeper in my faith. Thanks for sharing...
- I am not sure what you mean by transparency online. A DISQUS profile is only as transparent as the creator of it allowed it to be...And an application like that encourages people to work harder at...
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- And... if we don't fancy ourselves to be poets? Um, what then? (I took the liberty to listen anyway and liked it. : )
- I love the internet for the volume of information I can easily obtain. I'd love to have something like the Kindle one day, just to save space when I need to have several books with me; for...
GoodWordEditing.com
Editing, writing, faith, and work. And poetry because I like poetry.
In my last sentence tip, I completely oversimplified one effect of short sentences. You have to start somewhere right? I freely admit that I oversimplified things on purpose.
And I’m going to do it again. Heh heh heh.
Susanna Clarke is one of my new favorite authors. Read the ... Continue reading »
And I’m going to do it again. Heh heh heh.
Susanna Clarke is one of my new favorite authors. Read the ... Continue reading »
2 years ago
"beautiful prose for long periods?" It seems like there's some kind of pun going on there, but I hesitate to name exactly what it is.
And Moby Dick? Yuck. No wonder it bombed. (Or harpooned. Or whatever.)
2 years ago
As for me, this afternoon in the drizzly February weather that makes up our South Texas winters, I buckled down for business. Settling into a little local hideaway to escape email, armed with a red pen (because green pens are more expensive), holding my clipboard and a stack of articles, I began the good fight only noticing a little later that the parrot in the corner made me sneeze. And who keeps a parrot in the lobby of a business building anyway? Is the expectation that the poor caged bird will inspire shoppers, or is the bird itself just a forgotten purchase from some manager's own shopping trip? Either way, I was allergic to that bird and had to relocate to McDonald's where the coffee was as good as Andre said it would be.
2 years ago
2 years ago
2 years ago
Oh dear. I've got a lot of work to do on my writing skills. Thanks for the tips (and prompts).
2 years ago
The real trick to writing long sentences is to be conversational. The purpose of punctuation, in my opinion, is to clarify in places where the words themselves are insufficient. I don't think juggling punctuation tricks and tacking longer and longer strings of words together is going to make a better sentence--if I'm trying to appeal to a wide audience, that is.
I really prefer to avoid punctuation as much as possible? I almost consider colons and semi-colons to be a sentence's death sentence. (How could I resist that?)
I'll post something soon on long sentences that are easy to read. Thanks for the great comment!
2 years ago
2 years ago
2 years ago
I think one has to be concerned with content. An Amos shouldn't try to be an Isaiah. Though he could learn a thing or two from Isaiah. And vice-versa, for that matter.
2 years ago
And your comment about content is spot on. There is nothing at all wrong with long and complex sentences, but writers need to understand the effect those sentences will have on readers. And they need to accept that some readers will be alienated by the complexity.
2 years ago
Or, as in my case in re-reading some of my work, they will feel like they just need to take a breath! :)
2 years ago
And of course, as is the case here, leaving the reader totally out of the picture!
Points well made, and well taken!
2 years ago
Stacy, that's what the editing process is for! (For all of us.) In fact, one of the easiest ways I know to edit is simply to read the work out loud. Whenever I stumble on a sentence, that's a clue that there may be a problem. Certainly if I find myself gasping for breath, there's a problem. : )
Charity, I used to make my high school students read out loud sometimes—especially if we were reading a play. A lot of them would literally skip parentheticals. They have a place (to be sure), but I think parentheses send a visual clue to the reader that they can skip this tangent (if they want to).