A Writing Exercise
This is something I thought of for fun and have enjoyed considering in different contexts. And it’s perfect for those of us who like to write long, compound-complex sentences that are loaded with information. For the reader, each sentence requires a lot more effort to process than shorter, simpler ones. Not a bad thing in itself, but worth knowing/noticing.
Here’s the “game”:
- Pick a sentence that you would write or have written – a long, complicated one.
- Rewrite it (on paper, in your head, on your phone, whatever) as a series of the most simple sentences you can break it down into.
Example:
“Anna stood up from her seat at the kitchen table, moved towards the front door, and opened it to find a dark-haired man standing on her porch, soaked through by the rain.”
(there is nothing technically wrong with this sentence. It is NOT a run-on sentence just because it is long. Run-on sentences can be short; it’s all a matter of proper punctuation.)
Rewritten – “Anna stood. She moved to the door. She opened it. There was a man. He had dark hair. He was soaked.”
There are a bunch of different ways I could break down that sentence into simple sentences. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. But the key is that once you have simplified everything, you’ve cut out all of the descriptive elements and are just left with subjects and actions.
The irony is that while the sentences themselves are clearer, the mental picture they make isn’t. The subject/verb combination gives us the stick-figure sketch of what’s going on, while the details are the watercolors that make it a painting. Make sense?
Something else to make note of is that whatever your typical sentence structure is, you can break away from it to draw attention to a particular element. Our brains and eyes are automatically pulled to anything that seems different. Here’s another rewrite of my sentence:
“Anna stood up from her seat at the kitchen table, moved towards the front door, and opened it. There was a man. He had dark hair and was standing on her porch, soaked through by the rain.”
See the difference? In the first version of my sentence, the guy could’ve been anybody – someone she knew, or someone she didn’t. There wasn’t any particular significance to the man, as implied by the structure. He was just another element.
But break that information out in a contrasting simple sentence and it gains a lot more significance/emphasis because it is now OTHER. This is most likely someone she does NOT know, and his arrival is marked as significant via the difference in cadence/form/structure.
It is interesting to my nerd brain to consider how playing with things like structure can affect our interpretation of information just as much as word choice. The difference is that most people notice word choice way more than they notice syntax and format. I guess it’s like how we might pick a car based on how the chassis looks, but the unseen “guts” of the car are what we actually experience when we drive it.
So yeah, when you’re stuck in a line or need something to think about, play my sentence game and see how it influences your writing. =)
