#sentances

[eirarchitect]

why do i write mociet so much better than any other ship hello???

[platypusisnotonfire]

hey there, for the wip-ask thingy: what about "flight"

I have found yet again my overuse of commas. It's supposed to be one sentence....enjoy this entire paragraph that happens to also be one sentence.

“Short term stamina, my friend, short term,” she unfolded and stood gulping down breaths with her hands on her hips, “the longest airwing flight on record was fifteen minutes...most are under two...hand-to-hand combat too— you either die...or you win, it doesn’t take that long, I mean,” she gasped, “that record was set by me- but I dropped unconscious after it,” she gestured out in front of her even though she knew he couldn’t see her, “this isn’t even long distance, man, this is like…ultra distance… I’m gonna loose fifty pounds and most of them are going to be organs falling out of my body.”

[i-amm-writing]

Hey, Adeline.

Hope you're well. I have a problem. I use a lot of sticky sentences while writing and don't realise it until I read it out loud afterwards. I also have a fondness for metaphors, which sometimes tend to increase the glue index. Can you give me some tips for this?

Sincerely,

Anamika

I AM doing well, thank you!

/ I hope I'm interpretating your description of sticky correctly if not, feel free to correct me \

Reading it out loud is a great start! It helps the dialogue and prose to flow better. Edit until it's like silk flowing from your tongue (you get what I'm saying, right?) Continue to do that. And soon enough it will become natural to create flowing sentances from the start. Also get a second opinion (if one you trust is available) if you aren't very sure.

Now, metaphors. . .I totally suggest you make them your own. Using every day similes and figures of speech is a thing all writers fall into. It can easily get really repetitive. So, mirror your metaphors with your story world. Give a character their own personal analogy on life. It adds color and uniqueness to your story world.

Metaphors: A metaphor paints a picture, saying something is something else (ex: You are my sunshine)

Similes: This is when you compare something to something else (ex: Her smile was like the sun)

I hope this helps!!

[ebookporn]

Oldest known sentence written in first alphabet discovered – on a head-lice comb

Timeless fret over hygiene picked out on engraved Bronze age comb from ancient kingdom of Judah

by Ian Sample

It’s a simple sentence that captures the hopes and fears of modern-day parents as much as the bronze age Canaanite who owned the doubled-edged ivory comb on which the words appear.

Believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet, the inscription on the luxury item reads: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

Unearthed in Lachish, a Canaanite city state in the second millennium BCE and the second most important city in the kingdom of Judah, the comb suggests that humans have endured lice for thousands of years and that even the wealthiest were not spared the grim infestations.

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[ebookporn]

Our Favorite Sentences

By The Paris Review August 26, 2022

From Stoner by John Williams:

And so he had his love affair.

And:

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

These two sentences, pages apart, are both perfect. It should be obvious why, but perhaps they are more perfect because the first precedes the second, and the second is a kind of cracking open of the first or maybe a kind of blooming, grammatically and otherwise.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

And more of our favorite lines from our recent reading:

From “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick: 

She only stood, because if she ran they would shoot, and if she tried to pick up the sticks of Magda’s body they would shoot, and if she let the wolf’s screech ascending now through the ladder of her skeleton break out, they would shoot; so she took Magda’s shawl and filled her own mouth with it, stuffed it in and stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up the wolf’s screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda’s saliva; and Rosa drank Magda’s shawl until it dried.

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[ebookporn]

Reading in Slow Motion

WHEN I TEACH academic writing, I often direct students to the paragraph. I want them to make paragraphs an integral part of their thinking and planning, to consider the focus, arguments, and meanings of each. I’ve noticed that students can sometimes be so worried about the content of their overall arguments that they forget that their ideas must be structured into paragraphs. As they learn how to negotiate the larger problem of getting ideas to stay in shape, the trifling problem of the even smaller unit of writing, the sentence, is sometimes far down the list of their concerns. In fact, for some, it seems that the sentence is so simple, so obvious, as to become invisible.

I’m not pulling rank on my students: I too have been guilty of overlooking the sentence. Sometimes, when struggling to connect two ideas together in writing, I balk and type frantically “sentence needed here.” This vague directive, often emphasized in bold, seems to me to have something of the schoolteacher about it: I am hoping to scare myself into productivity and, hopefully, creativity. I’ll let my fingers walk across the keyboard for a while, and wonder when this produces results. I’m hoping some of my sentences will do my thinking for me, as if they are otherworldly beings with minds of their own.

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