A Quick Craft Series On Sentences, WRAPUP

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: #5

Broken By Its Own Weight

Loose Sentences That Break Under Their Own Weight:

This set of examples is directly borrowed from The New Strategy of Style by Weathers and Winchester.

A loose sentence is defined as one where the writer expresses the main thought at the outset and afterwards adds whatever details she wishes. Unlike compound or complex sentences, a loose sentence doesn't bring a lot of structure, and as the writer piles it on, can falter and collapse. Consider this example:

1. Red-tailed hawks hunt my meadow.

2. Red-tailed hawks hunt my meadow for rabbits and field mice.

3. Red-tailed hawks hunt my meadow for rabbits and field mice on those sheet-metal days in February.

4. Red-tailed hawks hunt my meadow for rabbits and field mice on those sheet-metal days in February when the grey ice bows down in the bluestem leaving rust patches where the sedge grass grows.

Improving these sentences can be done in a number of ways, mostly by avoiding the uninteresting loose sentence pattern entirely. For example 3 above, we can use a partially periodic form. [Periodic sentences hold the main thought till the end, and pulls the reader through the details to the end.]

On those sheet-metal days in February, red-tailed hawks hunt my meadow for rabbits and field mice.

The periodicity comes from delaying the “hunt” verb until closer to the end.

We can introduce more periodicity: On those sheet-metal days in February when the rabbits and field mice creep out to feed, red-tailed hawks hunt my meadow.

And we can also use an almost wholly periodic form: Hunting my meadow for rabbits and field mice on those sheet-metal days in February was a pair of red-tailed hawks.

Or we can shift modifiers between the subject and object: Red-tailed hawks, searching for rabbits and field mice, hunt my meadow.

Photocredit: Jordi Pratt Puig, dreamstime