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Date:8/19/10 @ 9:29pm From:Valerie Jean - drying out SourceSubject:[Group #1323687] August Newsletter  FITLY JOINED TOGETHER Everything in life has a balance to it. Several years ago Walt Disney did a movie called Lion King. The central theme is the circle of life or balance. Everything fits together or it falls apart. The same is true about sentences. If we don't put sentences together in their proper order it won't sound right, and if you're working in Word, you'll see all kinds of green underlining to the point you want to pull your hair out. So what do you do to make a proper sentence and get your work noticed by those agents who sit in their castles, behind high desks, with piles of manuscripts waiting to be read? How do you get past the gate keeper? Number one, you find out everything you can about how to write. You already know what you want to write, but what makes your work better, stand out, get noticed? How do you scale literary walls and present your classic work of art, the next best-seller, the book that will take the world by storm and put you in the number one position? I've already talked about spelling. If you can't spell, buy a dictionary. An editor or agent will toss your work in the slush pile with the first misspelled word. I've talked about editing and revision. After you get your work of art finished, it's time to cut it to ribbons, keeping the golden nugget that will make the editor and agent sit up and take notice. I've already talked to you about passive and active voice. Passive will never ever make your manuscript stand out from the rest of the best sellers out there. So what's next? Sentence Structure. What makes a sentence a sentence? When I was in school, I waded through subjects and predicates, verbs, nouns, pronouns, punctuation, sentence diagramming, and all the other odds and ends that make your sentence zing. The whole idea of proper sentence structure was to teach us how to write proper sentences. So when is it okay to write a sentence fragment, and when do you write a proper formal sentence? If you're writing a book you have to know first of all how to talk. Go out and listen to people. People do not speak in perfect sentence format. When you write dialogue you do need to keep that in mind so your story flows naturally. So when do you write with perfect sentence structure? When you aren't using dialogue. All those narrative paragraphs that move the story from scene to scene need proper sentence structure. No need making Word any more upset than it already is with your work. When you are moving your story through each scene you need to make your work shine. As Annie in the movie said, "It needs to shine like the top of the Chrysler Building." So let's make it shine. First of all understand, nobody is the perfect writer. We all have to learn the how-to of perfect speech. What do we need to focus on as writers? Everything. Every sentence has a subject and a predicate. Every sentence starts with a Capital letter and ends with some kind of punctuation. Every sentence has a noun and verb. Most sentences have adjectives, and some have adverbs. You will notice if you've been around the industry for very long editors don't like unnecessary adjectives or adverbs. You also need to punctuate. How and when do you use the comma and semi-colon? By the way, that's my biggest question, the other forms of punctuation are easily recognizable, the period, exclamation point, and question mark. Below are some sentences, which need fixing up. I'm also going to show how to fix the problems with the above article. Here is a perfect example of a problem with sentence structure. Word had some problems with me, not many, but can you find the problems before I point them out? Here is an example of a sentence fragment. Covering the plants in autumn. Here is an example of punctuation errors. Millie went to the store to buy milk cheese butter eggs bread and orange juice. Here is an example of capitalization errors. When I was in rome I visited the Eiffel tower before I came home You can certainly see a couple of errors in that sentence who would think rome would be in france or the Eiffel tower in Italy Working in Word I cant make the one mistake I see on here a lot, and that is the non capitalization of the letter i I also see a lot of missing end punctuation Of course, you saw the errors. It's quite simple really. Sentence structure is the backbone of every good writer. Without it, we would all be wannabe's and nothing more. Now let's look at the beginning of this article again and see where the problems lay. FITLY JOINED TOGETHER Everything in life has a balance to it. Several years ago, Walt Disney did a movie called Lion King. The central theme is the circle of life or balance. Everything fits together or it falls apart. The same is true about sentences. If we don't put sentences together in their proper order it won't sound right, and if you're working in Word, you'll see all kinds of green underlining to the point you want to pull your hair out. So what do you do to make a proper sentence and get your work noticed by those agents who sit in their castles, behind high desks, with piles of manuscripts to read? How do you get past the gatekeeper? Number one, you find out everything you can about how to write. You already know what you want to write, but what makes your work better, stand out, and noticed? How do you scale literary walls and present your classic work of art, the next best-seller, the book that will take the world by storm and put you in the number one position? I've already talked about spelling. If you can't spell, buy a dictionary. An editor or agent will toss your work in the slush pile with the first misspelled word. I've talked about editing and revision. After you get your work of art finished, it's time to cut it to ribbons, keeping the golden nugget that will make the editor and agent sit up and take notice. I've already talked to you about passive and active voice. Passive will never ever make your manuscript stand out from the rest of the best sellers out there. So what's next? Next, we look at sentence structure. What makes a sentence a sentence? When I was in school, I waded through subjects and predicates, verbs, nouns, pronouns, punctuation, sentence diagramming, and all the other things that make your sentence zing. The whole idea of proper sentence structure was to teach us how to write proper sentences. So when is it okay to write a sentence fragment, and when do you write a proper formal sentence? If you're writing a book, you have to know first, how to talk. Go out and listen to people. People do not speak in perfect sentence format. When you write dialogue, you do need to keep that in mind so your story flows naturally. So when do you write with perfect sentence structure? Use perfect sentence structure when you don't use dialogue. All those narrative paragraphs that move the story from scene to scene need proper sentence structure. No need making Word any more upset than necessary with your work. When you move your story through each scene, you need to make your work shine. As Annie in the movie said, "It needs to shine like the top of the Chrysler Building." So let's make it shine. First, understand nobody is the perfect writer. We all have to learn the how-to of perfect speech. What do we need to focus on as writers? Everything needs our focus. Every sentence has a subject and a predicate. Every sentence starts with a Capital letter and ends with some kind of punctuation. Every sentence has a noun and verb. Most sentences have adjectives, and some have adverbs. You will notice if you've been around the industry for very long editors don't like unnecessary adjectives or adverbs. You also need to punctuate. How and when do you use the comma and semi-colon? By the way, that's my biggest question, the other forms of punctuation are easily recognizable, the period, exclamation point, and question mark. Word had problems with what I wrote in the above article. Can you find the problems before I point them out? Comma's and semicolons are the hardest for me to understand. I ran across these definitions in the Harbrace College Handbook. Comma - Use the comma, which ordinarily indicates a pause and a variation in voice pitch, where required by the structure of the sentence. (Page 128) Use a comma before and, but, or, nor, for, so, and yet when they link to main clauses. (Page 129) Semicolon – Use the semicolon (a) between main clauses not linked by and, but, or, nor, for, so, or yet and (b) between coordinate elements containing commas. Do not use a semicolon between parts of unequal grammatical rank. (Page 151) You are now armed and ready to write the perfect novel. Remember dialogue is not the place for perfect sentence structure. Use perfect sentence structure to move the story along and add that certain something that will make an agent and editor sit up and take notice. Thank you for reading my newsletters. This will be my last one. I hope they were both entertaining and enlightening as we all learned about writing. Valerie Jean just4him |
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