Section 5

The Power of Composition: Putting it All Together

Don’t study an art; practice it.

—Japanese proverb

Getting the Spell Right

I hope by now you are feeling excited (and not too overwhelmed) by all the options we have for constructing English sentences. With all these options in your repertoire, you can make choices when you write and revise, in the process developing your own writing style.

Even more important, when you have a command of sentence structure, as well as of diction, you have power: the ability to cast a spell over your readers, to grab and keep their attention, to make things happen inside them. Readers are fickle creatures, with many other demands on their time and energy. We writers need all the linguistic resources we can find to keep them reading our words.

This does not mean that our sentences must be long and complex. It means, rather, that we must know what we are doing when we write and revise our sentences. The more we practice, the more we study the work of skilled writers, the more we will learn about how sentences affect readers, and the easier it will become for us to make our syntactic choices.

When we make our choices, we can consider a number of different things. In this section we’ll examine a few of them. First, we’ll review the basics of syntactic structures and some of our options for using them. Then we’ll see how these options enable us to produce writing that is clear, writing that contains the energy of movement, writing that has the quality of flow: all characteristics that grab and keep our readers’ attention. Finally, we’ll do some playing with sentence rhythm, to add variety and interest to our sentences.

In all these practices, we’ll be working in the realm of composition, where we draw on everything we have already learned about diction and syntax to create sentences powerful enough to transfer what we want to say into the minds of others, powerful enough to keep them spellbound.