100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Vary sentence construction
Ten ways to develop style

Most sentences have a subject, a predicate, and an object, and early in life we were taught to present them in that order. The dog ate the bone. Dick and Jane jumped into the river. A man walked down the street. Et cetera.

But identical sentence constructions bore readers. Certainly you should strive for clarity and not arrange your sentences in a way that strangles their logic. But you should also keep the primary elements of the sentence dancing so that they will create their own music.

Below are two paragraphs in which all the sentences are constructed the same way. They all begin with the subject, move on to the predicate, and end with an object if there is one. What conclusion about the writer do you draw after reading them?

The Welcome Wagon Lady twinkled her eyes and teeth at Joanna. She was sixty if she was a day. She had ginger hair, red lips, and a sunshine-yellow dress. She said, “You’re really going to like it here! It’s a nice town with nice people! You couldn’t have made a better choice!” Her brown leather shoulder bag was enormous. It was old and scuffed. She dealt Joanna packets of powdered breakfast drink from it. There was soup mix. There was a toy-size box of non-pollutant detergent. There was a booklet of discount slips that were good at twenty-two local shops. There were two cakes of soap. There was a folder of deodorant pads.

Joanna stood in the doorway. Both hands were full. She said, “Enough, enough. Hold. Halt. Thank you.”

The sentences are all simple constructions—grade school concoctions. One of the marks of an inexperienced writer is his or her inability to move beyond these basic sentence constructions. If Ira Levin’s best-selling novel had opened with those sentences, odds are good it would have been a worst-selling novel. But it didn’t. The actual opening of Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives follows. As you read it, take note of the variety of sentence constructions.

The Welcome Wagon Lady, sixty if she was a day but working at youth and vivacity (ginger hair, red lips, a sunshine-yellow dress), twinkled her eyes and teeth at Joanna and said, “You’re really going to like it here! It’s a nice town with nice people! You couldn’t have made a better choice!” Her brown leather shoulder bag was enormous, old and scuffed; from it she dealt Joanna packets of powdered breakfast drink and soup mix, a toy-size box of non-pollutant detergent, a booklet of discount slips good at twenty-two local shops, two cakes of soap, a folder of deodorant pads—

“Enough, enough,” Joanna said, standing in the doorway with both hands full. “Hold. Halt. Thank you.”