Having just finished The Art of Styling Sentences (fourth edition) by Ann Longknife and K. D. Sullivan, I would recommend it to serious students of writing for four reasons:
1. It offers practical tips for creating sentence variety by arranging words, phrases, and clauses and using by different punctuation marks.
2. It establishes a basic stylistic range by cogently discussing 20 basic sentence patterns.
3. It provides plenty of practice opportunities on each of the sentence patterns by posing key questions for reflection and giving end-of-section exercises.
4. It balances the authors’ approach to style with other rhetorical theories, such a Francis Christiansen’s cumulative and periodic sentences.
My take on the book is simple: For $9 you can’t go wrong. At the least, you are bound to find that you rarely or never use at least a few of the 20 sentence patterns; at best, you could well use the sentences patterns as a starting point from which to fashion more elaborate sentence patterns.
To purchase your copy of The Art of On-the-Job Writing by Philip Vassallo, click here: https://www.firstbooks.com/product_info.php?cPath=14&products_id=144
To purchase your copy of The Art of E-Mail Writing by Philip Vassallo, click here: https://www.firstbooks.com/product_info.php/cPath/53/products_id/196
-
A participant in one of my workshops, D. Hom, asked a question about hyphenating expressions such as “end of year.” Determining what to h...
-
It's a good thing that the hyphen is not a frequently used punctuation mark because most people don't know how to use it. The hyp... -
READER QUESTION Which of the following sentences is correct? The contract was signed by Lee, Sam, and me . The contract was ...