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The Art of Styling Sentences: 20 Patterns for Success

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There are two types of books on writing: theoretical and practical. While the former is necessary -- and in many cases quite good -- the latter is what gets down to the nuts and bolts of writing. "The Art of Styling Sentences" is such a book.

The book is grouped around 20 different sentence patterns: "Compound Sentence: semicolon, no conjunction" and "A variation: same word repeated in parallel structure" are but two examples. Each pattern is dissected, analyzed, and the reader is given several exercises to practice. Grammar rules are stressed (comma around an appositive, don't you know), and multiple variations on each pattern are offered.

Sound dry? Maybe just a bit. But I promise your writing will improve almost immediately. I read it several years ago, and today I can't imagine what I would do without the sentence forms I learned from this book.

"The Art of Styling Sentences" isn't a glamour book. It doesn't fill your head with enticing images of literary glory. But it's a simple, practical, down-to-earth guide on how to write better, cleaner, and with more impact. On my desk, I have four books that I consider indispensable to the craft of writing. "The Art of Styling Sentences" is one of them

I agree entirely with the comments of the previous interviewer. This book is one of a kind! I first read it, worked its examples and exercises, and devoured it in 1994 when I decided to take my writing abmitions seriously. This non-pretentious book honed my skills and solidified my style.

Five years later my first book is being published and I am working regularly as a free lance reporter and writer. The lessons learned form "The Art of Styling Sentences" carried me through the birthing of my writing career and are still with me. I just finished reading it for the second time and when I feel my powers of writing persausion slipping, I get it out and work some of the exercises. I keep it on my reference shelf next to my my dictionary, thesaurus, and "Chicago Manual of Style." For me there is no substitute. Writers young and old, published and unpublished buy a copy, read it, burn it into your brain and reap the rewards.

The authors deserve credit for having the right idea. Imitation is an efficient way to teach writing. However, even though _Styling_Sentences_ has some good tips and will help any young writer to improve, on the whole, it is incomplete, largely because of the authors' own incomplete understanding of syntax. The idea that writing consists of taking an S-V-O "kernel sentence" and elaborating it is fine, but weak. It's too simple. More useful for students is to learn the sentence in terms of its and its clauses' functions: purpose, concession, proviso, etc.--all the things students used to learn from Latin. After that, one can add modifiers and appositives and begin discussing the artful placement of all these pieces. That's not what this book does, though; it foregoes a functional analysis of sentence patterns for a purely formal one. Where style is a matter of form, this approach succeeds. The section on ordering a series is one such example, and in it the authors do an excellent job of showing writers how to avoid monotony. Likewise, the treatment of punctuation is done well, driving home the subtle differences between the comma, dash, and parentheses. Also good, but not exactly great, are the sections on modifier placement and repetition of key terms. But the final section, on "assorted patterns," is an eclectic and hardly exhaustive mix of sentence types where the authors' lack of organizational principle shows up most clearly. In that section another problem with this book becomes obvious: sometimes sentence patterns can't be studied without considering overarching rhetorical strategies. To learn that subject, I strongly recommend _Style:_10_Lessons_, by Wright. _Styling_Sentences_ will probably be more useful to you if read as a supplement to that book.

_Styling_ has some other minor flaws. The diagrams, created on a word processor, are poorly drawn and confusing. The authors' decision to label the sentence patterns by number seems to me to add a needless and arbitary layer of complexity. I shudder at the thought of students analyzing papers in this way: "Here you use a #9a, followed by a #6...." Far easier to use, and certainly easier to remember, would be simple descriptive names. If teachers need something shorter for marking papers, they could just abbreviate. Finally, some of the authors' explanations are simply bad. Likening a comma to a "hiccup" is misleading (a hiccup is nothing like the short, natural pause in speech a comma represents), and look at how they explain the absolute construction or the difference between periodic and loose sentences. Moments like those convince me that the authors, for professors of English, are not very well schooled in traditional grammar and syntax, and need to get their book to a grammarian quickly for a drastic overhaul.

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It's too easy to fall into a writing rut where too many of your sentences start to sound the same. The Art of Styling Sentences by Waddell, Esch, and Walker provides a series of exercises that will guide you through writing sentences that fall into 20 different grammatical patterns. When appropriate, variations are given for some of the patterns, thus allowing for exposure to even more sentence variety.

This practical book endorses an imitation approach to writing. After providing a grammatical break-down of each pattern's structure, examples from professional writers follow. Then space is provided for you to complete fill in the blank patterns before finally imitating the style examples with your own original sentences. It does offer light rhetorical guidance of when to use each pattern.

Chapter One serves as a good refresher course for grammatical concepts that writers don't consciously think about as they are drafting sentences. Chapter Two contains detailed exercises over the 20 patterns. Chapter Three provides ideas and examples of how to combine the patterns together for even more variety. Chapter Four focuses on the use of figurative language. Finally, Chapter Five contains longer examples from published writers where the patterns have been labeled in the margins. A helpful punctuation appendix also serves as a good resource for reminders on why we choose various marks to create certain effects.

My first encounter with this book was in a 400-level nonfiction writing course. Upon leafing through the book I resented that the professor expected us to complete what amounted to workbook exercises. Once I gave the book a chance, I realized just how stilted some of my writing often sounded. This book will break you of some bad writerly habits and help you be more open to writing sentences outside of your usual comfort zone.

JeriWB.com Teacher Writer Traveler

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The "Art of Styling Sentences" was a godsend in grad school. When writing research or scholastic articles, my professors advised me to vary my sentences stylistically, so readers wouldn't get bored.

This exercise book helped me immensely. This work not only taught me the basics of sentence structure (through a brief overview/refresher grammar course), it also helped me to construct more interesting, varied prose.

The "Art of Styling Sentences" provides examples from more sophisticated, professional writers (with the 20 sentence patterns). The book's authors also writers to collect and study sentence patterns inside newspapers, magazines and other periodicals. The writers are also included fun exercises (with every pattern), so aspiring writers can practice and apply what they've learned.

A weathered copy of this yellow book still remains on my bookshelf. In the future, plan to through the examples, once again, to improve my writing skills.

This is an older edition. You may want to pick up the recently-revised version of this book for modern sentence patterns that are in vogue.

I've recently read a few books pertaining to sentence structure, styling, and punctuation; however, most of them weren't very useful. They just weren't what I wanted or needed. The twenty patterns stressed in this book have helped me tremendously. But don't stop there. Don't forget to check out the appendix at the end of the book. Many of us (myself included) have felt the need at one time or another for a useful guide on the proper codes of punctuation. The Appendix here is one of the best guides I've seen on this topic. When should you use a colon, semicolon, comma, or dash? Many of us get confused with these, esecially when writing compound sentences. Although I love to write, I am far from being perfect at it; I still have a lot to learn. Don't we all? 'The Art Of Styling Sentences' has assisted me a great deal and has been the most useful text on grammatical prose that I've read to date.

There are few good ideas presented, but not many. The book doesn't explain why a certain sentence pattern would be powerful or useful in a particular circumstance. Some sentence patterns are similar or have similar function. The book emphasizes a lot on the correct syntax to create a certain sentence structure, which I consider unnecessary because I my grammar is not the problem. I guess it is OK for $7.