Best Advice

The best advice I ever received about writing came from a grammar class I took a few years ago. Until that point, I had loved writing long, complex sentences. Whether writing fiction or even an e-mail, my sentences flourished like leafy elms, branching out into clauses, parenthetical phrases, and compound sentences. But when we read some excerpts from Hemingway, his use of the short sentence really stood out. The idea of placing a short sentence in a paragraph of long, weedy thoughts fascinated me. The short sentence can be used to symbolize so many things: a stark emotion, a jolt back to reality from a narrator's daydreamy prose, a sudden accident, an unexpected guest, a change in tone, a transition sentence. In fact, in addition to diction, the choice of sentence type is very important part of writing that often gets overlooked by inexperienced writers—any story, from any point of view or any character, tends to get written in the style in which they are most comfortable, even if it doesn't fit what they're trying to do. My advice for writers is to read s story once for plot and metaphors and then again, taking note of sentence length/type and diction (another entry for sure—anybody want to field this one?). Study the sentence structures established writers use—they aren't there by accident.