One of the things we talked about today in class was varying sentence lengths, and I think this is another form of creating voice in our writing. We vary the length of our sentences naturally while speaking. It’s just one of those things we do without thinking when we talk, but writing, it takes a bit more of a conscious effort to remember to vary the length of your sentences.
I took a creative writing class last semester, and one of the strategies the teacher spoke of was of varying sentence lengths to create a particular mood in your reader. For example, if you want the reader to feel overwhelmed, create a sensory overload the same way you do it in real life: with way more information than the reader can digest. Make your sentences long, run-on, and full of visual information. Bombard your reader with sentences that bleed into each other to create a frenetic pace.
If you want your reader to pace themselves, create sentence breaks more often, and this will make them at ease. That’s the way our professor explained it, at least.
Concerning the session on commas with Shannon and Stephanie, I thought they did a great job! Only use commas for compound sentences. And put in the comma before one of the FANBOYS. The key, though, is to only do it for compound sentences. I appreciated Barbara’s e-mail afterward alerting us of this, too.
I also appreciated Barbara’s postponement of our first checkpoint for the grammar scrapbooks. It’s just tedious looking for these errors. But perhaps it will give me an excuse to spend tonight just reading sports illustrated. I wonder how many errors the swimsuit edition has?
I first thought the scrapbook was a waste of time, because guys don’t do scrapbooks. And the jury is still out. However, with the use of swimsuit models as a background to my scrapbook, I’ve become a huge fan of scrap booking.
I felt like our time in class this week was particularly productive. Using the time to work together in groups and look for errors in the Evergreen gave me a few examples from in class that I can use in my scrapbook, and made our next checkpoint less intimidating.
I guess my question this week will pertain to the scrapbook. Does anyone know whether or next checkpoint will just be ten examples, or will it be 20 examples (since it’s technically our second checkpoint)? Perhaps a compromise of 15 would be more fair?
That is a good question, Byron, and I do not have a for sure answer. What I can tell you is that the syllabus says that ten examples are due on October 28th, so I would assume that we are by passing the last ten examples and that ten examples will be do this time. But, this is of course, completely up to Professor Monroe.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I do agree with you that last class was very productive, especially because we learned a new grammar rule that help the class look for new examples of errors in print. However, I do think that it could have been more productive if more students showed their findings off to the class so that we could see different examples of different errors.