#607 overall
Building Great Sentences: How to Write Like the Pros
The Great Courses
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2022 · score 0.9
A Great Courses lecture series by Brooks Landon on the craft of sentence construction, looking at how skilled writers build sentences and how to simplify overly complex ones. It is offered as a set of audio-friendly lectures.
Commenters point to its concrete advice on compacting sentences with multiple dependent clauses, which one says is especially useful for technical writing, and note the audio version works well for a commute.
Humanities & Social Scienceintermediatepaidvideo lectures#writing#sentence structure#technical writing#style#landon
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I'll also add the course from The Great Courses - 'Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft' by Brooks Landon.
Just the audio version is sufficient, especially if you can listen to it on a daily commute. They give specific advice on how to simplify sentences that have multiple dependent clauses into a more compact form, which can be particularly useful for technical writing.
First, don't go exclusively to expert writers to learn the craft. Skills of educating are specific, and those skills differ from the skills of talented writers.
IMHO, our society suffers from missing this divergence on a grander scale: the people who are the best at conjugating verbs also think they deserve to have their take on the day's current events broadcast to tens of millions of people in our newspapers and online content farms. The result is largely beautifully written dreck that causes political calamity, and people end up trusting someone who says "bigly" to lead them.
Another way to put this first point of mine: the best NBA players don't make the best coaches, because they know how to move on the court in ways they can't put into words for lesser talented, younger athletes. Likewise, being an excellent writer doesn't automatically yield the empathy needed to get into the minds of less talented writers who need baseline concepts spelled out in multiple, concrete ways.
So for that reason, I wouldn't exclusively rely on whatever advice/feedback your wife is generous enough to give you (though what a great boon to be married to someone with a skillset you currently need to develop: I hope you cook well or something!)
Second, this post is exactly the right approach imho: gather as many different approaches as possible and keep trying each one on for size until you've run your own massive trial and error process and exhausted all free and cheaply available resources.
As for what I'd recommend as one of the many people commenting here: Try the Great Courses audiobook on the topic to hear what writers hear in their heads when they distinguish good sentences from bad ones: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/building-great-sente... Try Stanley Fish's book about how successive sentences work together with one another: https://www.amazon.com/How-Write-Sentence-Read-One/dp/006184.... Try reading stuff you love and focusing in on one or two sentences and the parts of speech those authors use, then try to mirror that and slightly improve the next thing you write.
Good luck!