Fear of Error Before the holidays, I wrote a brief post commenting on something Stan Carey had written in the Macmillan Dictionary blog about adopting a forgiving attitude towards mistakes. I concluded that post by saying that “Better writing will come not from the fear of error but from the appreciation of the power of great prose.” Although I now wish I had been a bit less pompous, that is an accurate reflection of how I feel. At least it is what I tell others they should feel. But I had an interesting moment of further reflection recently that made me wonder how well I practice what I preach. I was reading the Facebook comments on a Huffington Post article. I was so impressed by the sanity of this response. I was hoping that this post was going to be about the use of commas in restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, but that just didn’t happen. Like this: Like Loading...
The Sentence as a Miniature Narrative Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. I like to imagine a sentence as a boat. Each sentence, after all, has a distinct shape, and it comes with something that makes it move forward or stay still — whether a sail, a motor or a pair of oars. My analogy seems simple, but it’s not always easy to craft a sentence that makes heads turn with its sleekness and grace. Over the course of several articles, I will give you the tools to become a sentence connoisseur as well as a sentence artisan. At some point in our lives, early on, maybe in grade school, teachers give us a pat definition for a sentence — “It begins with a capital letter, ends with a period and expresses a complete thought.” Library of Congress But that definition misses the essence of sentencehood. For a sentence to be a sentence we need a What (the subject) and a So What (the predicate). I like to think of the whole sentence as a mini-narrative. “They shoot the white girl first.” — Toni Morrison, “Paradise”