Brooks Landon - Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

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First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

Copyright The Teaching Company LLC, 2013

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Excerpt from The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume III: 1923-1928, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. The Letters of Virginia Woolf published in six volumes. Letters copyright 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. Published by Mariner Books and Hogarth Press. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, The Random House Group Limited, and The Society of Authors, as the literary representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence by Francis Christensen from Notes Toward a New Rhetoric, Third Edition, by Francis and Bonniejean Christensen, edited by Don Stewart. Copyright Don Stewart, 2007. By permission of Don Stewart.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Landon, Brooks.

Building great sentences : how to write the kinds of sentences you love to read / Brooks Landon.

pages cm

A PLUME BOOK.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-61402-0

1. English languageSentencesStudy and Teaching. 2. English languageRhetoricStudy and Teaching. I. Title.

PE1441.L334 2013

808'.042dc23 2012051011

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

C ant begin to suggest ways of building great sentences without lots of examples of what built great sentences look like. So my first debt is to the writers beyond naming and numbering whose sentences have rewarded readers over the centuries and have intrigued and inspired me over the years. Some of those marvelous writers have been my students in a Prose Style class Ive been offering at Iowa in one form or another for thirty-four years, and I thank my students for all they have taught me. One in particular, Nathan Kreuter, is now Professor Kreuter and is adding his insights to our appreciation and understanding of prose style. My debt to colleagues in the University of Iowa English Department is huge. In this book I detail my gratitude to Carl Klaus, but I need to mention a debt that is harder to detail: everything that I believe about writing has been immeasurably influenced by Paul Diehl. Ed Folsom, Garrett Stewart, Miriam Gilbert, and Bonnie Sunstein have been inspirations, setting standards I strive to meet, too often falling short. I remain stunned by the vision of The Teaching Company and thank its fine professionals for getting this ball rolling. Without Becky Coles steady guiding hand, fine judgment, and saintly patience at Plume, this manuscript would never have been wrestled into shape. And, finally, a shout-out to Jonathan Lethem, who gets Thomas Berger and crafts some pretty mean sentences himself!