[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Throughout my lifetime, my ethnicity has played a significantrole in my existence, being of mixed race.Or maybe it s notso much this as it is my attitude towards this world and whatcombining two divergent cultures has produced.Unhappy sentencesMy local paper arrives and reminds me there are as many ways towrite a bad sentence as there are people to write them.Sentences know a thousand ways to die in the telling; everyunhappy sentence, like Tolstoy s unhappy family, is unhappy after itsown fashion.But most failed sentences are loosely strung; they getaway from their writer, who never listened hard enough to notice.Like these:Work on the foreshore trail should commence soon after tenders were put out for thejob late last year.(Tense shift; the writer may have meant us to hear a commaafter soon, but soon after makes the sentence try to mean something else, intwo incompatible tenses.)Work will include landscaping, mangrove planting, excavation, lighting, creatingpathways and boardwalks, and sea wall repair, and should be finished by the end ofthe year.(If you re going to make a list, structure every item on it in the same66 writing wellway  all single words like landscaping, or all phrases like sea wall repair, notthree or four different ways; and it might have sounded better as  The work,which should be finished by year s end, will include. )Meanwhile, the possibility of traffic mayhem in small streets behind Bellevuemansion which sits near the east walkway was one of the issues raised late lastyear at a consultation with residents in Town Hall on the Black Bay Park DraftManagement Plan.(Hellishly long subject followed by a verb to be pluswordy subject complement was one of the issues raised; nonrestrictive relativeclause  about Bellevue mansion, which probably should be BellevueMansion, if that s its name  without commas fore and aft; concluding withfour prepositional phrases, the last of which includes an horrendous nouncluster.)Then there s the accidental ambiguity of a sentence somebody sharedin a class the other night:  I haven t seen the sandy-haired guywearing the brown overalls lately.(Have you seen him wearing otherclothes, or haven t you seen him wearing overalls or any other sortof clothes at all?)Tame those sentences; train them; rein them in.Help them stepout elegantly.Try thisFix the sentences from my local rag (and from my class).Somemay need breaking into more than one sentence.Make themsmooth and unambiguous and elegant.VerbsA magazine editor said to me once,  You d think there d be a book ofverbs; they re so important. She meant something more than a the-saurus.She meant something that might be called Two Thousand Verbsto Use Before You Die a book organized by activities with lists of verbsunder each.It s a good idea.Verbs make sentences go.They are where and howa sentence lives.They are where a sentence moves, where it gets upand runs or walks or means or elopes or ignites or loves or hates orsentencing 67talks or recommends or concludes or surrenders or speaks its mind.The verb is the breath of the thought; it s the heart that pumps theblood that keeps the sentence alive.If your verbs are good, your sen-tence has a chance.Recalling my editor s idea, I took a break from writing this chapterand walked out into the rain and wind to the top of a mountain.Iwent into the field to gather some verbs, like a naturalist stalking but-terflies.When they came to me I wrote them in the margin of mymap.But the rain seeped into my backpack and flooded my list andswept twenty verbs or more away.A few hundred survived the drench-ing, though, and by the time I lay down in my bunk and slept, I hadblackened five pages of a foolscap pad with their names.Verbs spawn.Open your mind, and in they flock; write a hundred on a page, and inan hour you ll have a thousand.Here are some of the verbs thatdawned on me and multiplied [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]