The Pitch

It's not very nice at all, and it's not remotely fair. But it's true. Two persons have roughy the same idea. One puts it down in crisp, vivid prose. The other, with the same thought in mind, sinks it in a stew of mushy, colorless language and stumble-bum syntax. Oh, sure, the idea may still be there, vaguely, but a reader's desire to read any further is not. It's gone. Poof!
     It's a cruel truth, but .  .  .
​                  (read more?)

Expostulations

Four Nano-aggressions

Do  animals talk?

Picture
I was born a little white moth in a rough neighborhood full of brackets, slashes, deletes, and dead ends. For some reason my parents named me Backspace. Back then, F12 was barely in the picture . . .

Hits from the Morgue

(Unpublished (or unpublishable)
​
Gimme Shelter (2007)

The Challenge

How do I write a sentence so that a reader who -- let's face it -- could be doing anything else will read my next sentence and the next and so on?

To answer this question, we explore the nature of the  English sentence; in particular, that grammatical and rhetorical glue that locks words together in sentences as well as the rather different sort of binding energy that pulls sentences into a paragraph. 

The sentence is our subject.
The next sentence is our object.

​Premises

All sentences are assemblages of disparate language elements (phones, words, phrases, clauses, pauses, tropes, and images) that cohere in a unitary force field hatched initially, or perhaps simultaneously, by a thought. 
​
 We examine many sentences here and examine their constituent properties and parts. Also, we look beyond the isolated sentence to see its attachment to nearby sentences and, theoretically, to all the other possible sentences in the linguasphere. 

Our goal is an understanding of  prose style, which is the ineffable signature of the individual sentence maker. To get there we employ a theory of style and draw ideas and guidance from modern linguistics as well as from the ancient art of rhetoric. 

Conjectures

The sentence, not the word, is the atomic unit of the linguasphere.
​ (Is it?) 

A sentence, once written or spoken or thought, becomes an actual thing, like a virus or a telephone number or a  formula or a circuit or a circus.
(Does it?)

Quite possibly, the sentence is the elemental particle of all human thought.  
(Who says?) 

Long shot:
​ Beep, beep, beep. (Cue spooky background music.)
Perhaps the sentence is an alien life-form lodged in the human brain?
(Could it be?)
The Theory
NextSentence offers an approach to writing based
on a theoretical framework of four rhetorical properties (velocity, vocality, visibility, and voltage). The framework is necessarily theoretical because the mental processes that account for the production of a single sentence are, as far as anyone knows, beyond the reach of hard science, and thus
​ can be dealt with only in 
theoretical categories . . . .
​ (read more)                  
Picture
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Activities       
 
                      Flash Drills
  1. Cut the Fat
  2. Series Clinic
  3. "Be" Swat
  4. X the Adverb
  5. Rewrite!
  6. Do Come In
  7. Slip Knots
         
​          Praxis
  1. Influenza
  2. Style DNA
  3. Colonics  
  4. Semicolonics​










                   Worth trying!​

Who are you?
Depending on your status as a sentence maker, you may want to visit pages that are tailored to your interests. 


Student
( In one of my English classes, or out there in someone else's )

Ordinary Person
( A visitor or a prospective client? )

Language Insider
( Teacher, linguist, poet, writer, neurologist, comedian )