tailieunhanh - Essential guide to writing part 11

Purpose is even deeper, supporting strategy and involving not only what you write abom but how you affect readers. A brief example will clarify these overlapping concepts. It was written by a college student in a fifteen-minuteclassroom exercise. | For more material and information please visit PART The Sentence For more material and information please visit CHAPTER 18 The Sentence A Definition Good sentences are the sinew of style. They give to prose its forward thrust its flexibility its strong and subtle rhythms. The cardinal virtues of such sentences are clarity emphasis concision and variety. How to achieve these qualities will be our major concern in this part. First however we must understand in a brief and rudimentary way what a sentence is. It is not easy to say. In fact it is probably impossible to define a sentence to everyone s satisfaction. On the simplest level it may be described as a word or group of words standing by itself that is beginning with a capital letter and ending with a period question mark or exclamation point. In speech the separateness of a sentence is marked by intonation and pauses. And yet an effective sentence involves more than starting with a capital and stopping with a period. The word or words must make sense expressing an idea or perception or feeling clear enough to stand alone. For example consider these two sentences The package arrived. Finally. The first consists of a subject and verb. The second is only a single word an adverb detached from a verb arrived . The idea might have been expressed in one sentence For more material and information please visit IJ2 THE SENTENCE The package finally arrived. The package arrived finally. Finally the package arrived. But we can imagine a situation in which a speaker or writer wanting to stress exasperation feels that finally should be a sentence by itself. As that example indicates there are sentences which contain subjects and verbs and sentences which do not. The first kind The package arrived is grammatically complete and is the conventional form sentences take in composition. The second type of sentence Finally in our example does not contain a subject and .