Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

Sentence construction
Quicken and polish
Tweak

And everything you’ve been noticing about your paragraphs applies at the sentence level, too.

In fact, the construction of the sentence itself can turn your words from boring ramblings, into powerful bolts of lightning!

It can single-handedly hold (or lose) the reader’s interest.

It’s beyond the scope of this book to look at all the finer points of sentence construction (like nouns, verbs, complements, modifiers, conjunctions, prepositional phrases, and so on).

But to give you a quick idea, consider this sentence:

“The Japanese man waits for a bus.”

By playing around with it, you can change its impact.

“For a bus, the Japanese man waits.” What effect does this have? Could it change the feel or the meaning of a paragraph?

Take a joke, for example. A punchline always serves up the “kicker” at the end.

Henny Youngman’s classic line was “Take my wife — please!” The first three words sound like a setup, as in “Take my wife, for example... ” But it twists at the end. “Please” turns the meaning upside down, and gets a laugh. (Well, it did in its day, anyway.) If you said, “Please take my wife,” the joke would rely on performance instead. It’s a subtle difference. And that’s what you need to look for in your own work. Put your words in order!

Be exacting. Use the most effective words in the most effective way. It doesn’t take much time to learn these things.

But it will take practice.

If you don’t know these finer points of the English language, it’s no excuse. Learn them, and keep moving forward!