How To Write a (Good) Sentence

[stilltrucking]

As Paul Harding, who won last year's Pulitzer for his own peripatetic sentences in his novel Tinkers, puts it: "The criteria for caloric prose is that it be nutritious. Getting at essence isn't always a matter of stripping away length. That's part of the modernist myth of de-mythification." When the high-modernist poet Ezra Pound wrote in his 1913 manifesto "A Few Don'ts" that "the natural object is always the adequate symbol," Hemingway listened, and together they lent artistic force to the notion that the truth is necessarily concise. A generation later in Britain, George Orwell reinforced this notion but with a new political emphasis in his 1946 essay "Why I Write," in which he stated: "Good prose is like a windowpane." A lack of political purpose, Orwell wrote, had "betrayed [him] into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally." Elaborateness came to be associated with false rhetoric and the aesthetic indulgences of a bygone world between the two wars.

http://www.slate.com/id/2282086

[one of those jerks]

Here is some some posts of mine that could dam sure use some editing.


http://studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.p ... rt#p102739

[tarbaby]

Never get used to the weather here. How the storms blow in so suddenly, so sudden like a train coming on, calm one minute and the next the wind howls like someone just through the switch on the wind machine. woke me up out of a sound sleep. I had left a window open when I went to bed because it was so warm. The storm came right in that window and tumbled me out of bed.

[stilltrucking]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Allan_Gilbert


a woman's face in a photograph is she smiling at me? Is she smiling?

"Woman was Gods second blunder"



image source

[stilltrucking]

A clean white handkerchief in my pocket and I felt like I knew where my towel was.

When is the last time I felt sartorially ...correct. Not with all this weight. Not unless I had the dough for custom fitted shirts. Where is my vanity. I walk around in rags.

Altruism kind of sucks if you got to walk around in droopy underwear.

[MrGuilty]

If I was wise I would not be sitting here.

http://studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=20752

If I were wise I would not be sitting here.

http://mleddy.blogspot.com/2007/03/if-i ... i-was.html

I got a long row to hoe here.