Well, there’s obviously not going to be lot that will help
my writing from just the introduction to the site video, although it was
helpful to know how to work the site. I think that working primarily on the
sentence level is going to be a very different approach, because in the past,
we’ve been taught mostly on the paragraph or essay level and simply told: avoid
choppy sentences and run-ons, but focus on having that nice 5 paragraph essay
and the sentence structure for your paragraphs. It was pretty easy to combine
the sentences when they gave you two or three ideas to meld together, but it
was considerably harder when, as in the first sentence of the glasses example,
they asked us to combine four or five different ideas. It took me several tries
to be able to combine them all into one sentence; I kept attempting to create
two. The imitation was harder. Do we
start out by keeping most of the same words and punctuation, but changing the
subject and then make it our own from there? Anyway, I think that will be the
more effective of the two exercises- once I get the hang of it.
It will be nice to work on sentences more. its like art, you start with the general idea, which is like the paragraphs, then you add detail, which is the sentences. It really should help us later. I think with the imitation that you can change words, but that it should have the same flow as the original. it is tricky though.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on how it can get challenging when you are trying to add more ideas to your sentence because it could lose the focus on what point you're trying to get across. The imitation is harder because you don't want to plagiarize which it really isn't if you're taking their style but it might still be I don't know. Eventually we'll develop the practice on how to write exceptional sentences with practice.
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