The Well-Crafted Sentence A Writer's Guide to Style

What makes a sentence strong? Nora Bacon’s The Well-Crafted Sentence: A Writer’s Guide to Style demystifies grammatical concepts and stylistic choices by taking apart expert writers’ sentences as illustrations and asking students to practice crafting and revising their own. Examples throughout the text are excerpted from 11 readings collected in an anthology at the end of the book, so you can teach style in the context of a larger argument or narrative. With four new model texts, expanded explanations of grammatical concepts, and new coverage of figures of speech, the third edition invites students to experiment with sentence structures that make writing stronger.

Contents

Introduction

1. Approaches to Style

Style as Identity

Style as Embellishment

The Plain Style

Style in Context: Making Rhetorically Smart Choices

Style in Academic Writing

2. The Sentence’s Working Parts

Clause Structure

Transformations within the Clause

Extending the Clause

Joining Independent Clauses

Modifiers

Dependent Clauses

3. Well-Focused Sentences: The Subject-Verb Pair

Populated Prose

Active Voice and Passive Voice

Variation in Sentence Focus

Sharpening the Focus

Double-Check Sentences with Abstract Subjects

Double-Check Sentences with There in the Subject Position

Keep Subject Phrases Short

Uncover Subjects Buried in Introductory Phrases

Transform Nouns to Verbs

4. Well-Balanced Sentences: Coordination and Parallel Structure

Coordination

Parallel Structure

Correlative Conjunctions

Stylistic Effects in Coordinate Series

Long Series

The Echo Effect: Pairs

The Echo Effect: Repetition

Repetition and Paragraph Cohesion

5. Well-Developed Sentences: Modification

Early Modifiers and Paragraph Cohesion

The Crescendo Effect: The Pleasures of the Periodic Sentence

Leaping and Lingering: The Pleasures of the Cumulative Sentence

6. Adding Color with Adjectivals

The Structure of Adjective Clauses

Choices in Crafting Adjective Clauses

Who or Whom?

With or without Commas?

Which or That—or Not?

Reducing Adjective Clauses

Adjective Phrases

7. Adding Action with Verbal Phrases

Functions of Verbal Phrases

Managing Emphasis with Verbal Phrases

Reducing Clauses to Create Verbal Phrases

Editing Checks for Verbal Phrases

8. Layering Meaning with Appositives and Absolutes

Noun Phrases in Apposition

Identifying People

Defining Terms

Filling in Examples

Renaming with a Twist

9. Special Effects: Expectations and Exceptions

Focus on the Subject

Completeness and Explicitness

Sentence Variety

Figures of Speech

ANTHOLOGY

Model Texts for Writers

Louise Erdrich, Shamengwa

Ben Fountain, Soldiers on the Fault Line: War, Rhetoric, and Reality

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Sin Boldly

Atul Gawande, from Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Helen MacDonald, from H is for Hawk

Barack Obama, A More Perfect Union

Tim O’Brien, On the Rainy River

David Sedaris, Genetic Engineering

Jane Smiley, Say it Ain’t So, Huck

Amy Tan, Mother Tongue

Lily Wong Fillmore, Loss of Family Languages: Should Educators Be Concerned?

Glossary of Grammatical Terms

Index

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