The Well-Crafted Sentence
A Writer's Guide to StyleThird Edition| ©2019 Nora Bacon
What makes a sentence strong? Nora Bacon’s The Well-Crafted Sentence: A Writer’s Guide to Style demystifies grammatical concepts and stylistic choices by taking apart expert writers’ sentences as illustrations and asking students to practice crafting and revising their own. Examples throug...
What makes a sentence strong? Nora Bacon’s The Well-Crafted Sentence: A Writer’s Guide to Style demystifies grammatical concepts and stylistic choices by taking apart expert writers’ sentences as illustrations and asking students to practice crafting and revising their own. Examples throughout the text are excerpted from 11 readings collected in an anthology at the end of the book, so you can teach style in the context of a larger argument or narrative. With four new model texts, expanded explanations of grammatical concepts, and new coverage of figures of speech, the third edition invites students to experiment with sentence structures that make writing stronger.
ISBN:9781319249946
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ISBN:9781319058623
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Teach style in context
What makes a sentence strong? Nora Bacon’s The Well-Crafted Sentence: A Writer’s Guide to Style demystifies grammatical concepts and stylistic choices by taking apart expert writers’ sentences as illustrations and asking students to practice crafting and revising their own. Examples throughout the text are excerpted from 11 readings collected in an anthology at the end of the book, so you can teach style in the context of a larger argument or narrative. With four new model texts, expanded explanations of grammatical concepts, and new coverage of figures of speech, the third edition invites students to experiment with sentence structures that make writing stronger.
Features
Practical and empowering lessons, built around examples from expert writers, give students the tools to craft rhetorically successful sentences. The chapters guide students through the techniques and strategies necessary to understand and achieve stylistic effects, using illustrations and models from the brief anthology at the back of the book.
A brief anthology of readings by accomplished writers provides a source for examples and exercises, as well as inspiration for students. Eleven model texts by distinguished writers in multiple genres, such as Louise Erdrich, David Sedaris, Amy Tan, and Barack Obama, show rather than tell students what attention to style can do for them. Headnotes for each reading highlight and explain the authors’ stylistic choices.
Integrated exercises offer hands-on practice with a variety of sentence styles. Exercises integrated throughout the chapters ask students to analyze passages, to imitate sentence structures, to develop and combine sentences, and to edit others’ work as well as to apply what they’ve learned to their own writing.
Friendly, approachable, and elegant, the text highlights the benefits of attention to style and offers a range of revision strategies that give students the tools to strengthen and develop their writing.
New to This Edition
Four new readings provide up-to-date models in a variety of genres and showcase style in academic writing. Carefully chosen for excellence in prose, the new model texts include an excerpt from Being Mortal by Atul Gawande; the speech, "Soldiers on the Fault Line: War, Rhetoric, and Reality," by Ben Fountain; an excerpt from H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald; and the essay, "Second Thoughts on Mark Twains Masterpiece," by Jane Smiley.
New and revised exercises offer more opportunities for students to experiment with sentences. Throughout the book, drawing from the new model texts, additional exercises allow students to build the skills they need to revise their own essays and stories.
Expanded discussions of grammatical concepts build on the book’s successful approach to teaching style by adding more example sentences from model texts to explain trickier points.
New coverage of figures of speech show students the power of using special effects in their writing. A discussion of figures of speech, including parallelism, antithesis, and asyndeton, shows how occasionally breaking with convention and using special effects allows writers to communicate more powerfully or more beautifully, and take their readers by surprise.
Expanded instructor’s resources for are available for download at macmillanlearning.com. In addition to downloadable exercises and sample responses for selected exercises, the instructor’s resources include sample assignments asking students to write stylistic analyses of texts they admire.
- Students can find grammar instruction online; the kind of thing The Well-Crafted Sentence does is not easily found. (Chris Ervin, Oregon State University)
- This isnt a handbook. Its a book about craft at the sentence level. Its a book that helps students see the potential outcome of successful and careful editing at the sentence level and how such careful editing pays for itself at the larger level of discourse, be that the paragraph, essay, or book. (Chris Ervin, Oregon State University)
- This is a really fine book on sentence structure -- just the thing that many undergraduates need. Without dumbing down the concepts its teaching, its approachable and instructive. When I assign it, my students finish the semester writing clearer and more elegant sentences. (Isaac Cates, University of Vermont)
- A small, affordable book that will help your students understand how to write well and how "good" writing is created. (Krysten Anderson, Roane State Community College)
- The Well-Crafted Sentence
provides very practical advice that allows a student to move beyond their basic understanding of the language and become the creator of their own writing. (Jennifer Lynn Browning, Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College)
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The Well-Crafted Sentence
Third Edition| ©2019
Nora Bacon
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The Well-Crafted Sentence
Third Edition| 2019
Nora Bacon
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface for Instructors
About the Author
Introduction
1. Approaches to Style
Style as Identity
Style as Embellishment
The Plain Style
Style in Context: Making Rhetorically Smart Choices
Style in Academic Writing
2. The Sentence’s Working Parts
Clause Structure
Transformations within the Clause
Extending the Clause
Joining Independent Clauses
Modifiers
Dependent Clauses
3. Well-Focused Sentences: The Subject-Verb Pair
Populated Prose
Active Voice and Passive Voice
Variation in Sentence Focus
Sharpening the Focus
Double-Check Sentences with Abstract Subjects
Double-Check Sentences with There in the Subject Position
Keep Subject Phrases Short
Uncover Subjects Buried in Introductory Phrases
Transform Nouns to Verbs
4. Well-Balanced Sentences: Coordination and Parallel Structure
Coordination
Parallel Structure
Correlative Conjunctions
Stylistic Effects in Coordinate Series
Long Series
The Echo Effect: Pairs
The Echo Effect: Repetition
Repetition and Paragraph Cohesion
5. Well-Developed Sentences: Modification
Early Modifiers and Paragraph Cohesion
The Crescendo Effect: The Pleasures of the Periodic Sentence
Leaping and Lingering: The Pleasures of the Cumulative Sentence
6. Adding Color with Adjectivals
The Structure of Adjective Clauses
Choices in Crafting Adjective Clauses
Who or Whom?
With or without Commas?
Which or That—or Not?
Reducing Adjective Clauses
Adjective Phrases
7. Adding Action with Verbal Phrases
Functions of Verbal Phrases
Managing Emphasis with Verbal Phrases
Reducing Clauses to Create Verbal Phrases
Editing Checks for Verbal Phrases
8. Layering Meaning with Appositives and Absolutes
Noun Phrases in Apposition
Identifying People
Defining Terms
Filling in Examples
Renaming with a Twist
9. Special Effects: Expectations and Exceptions
Focus on the Subject
Completeness and Explicitness
Sentence Variety
Figures of Speech
ANTHOLOGY
Model Texts for Writers
Louise Erdrich, Shamengwa
Ben Fountain, Soldiers on the Fault Line: War, Rhetoric, and Reality
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Sin Boldly
Atul Gawande, from Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Helen MacDonald, from H is for Hawk
Barack Obama, A More Perfect Union
Tim O’Brien, On the Rainy River
David Sedaris, Genetic Engineering
Jane Smiley, Say it Ain’t So, Huck
Amy Tan, Mother Tongue
Lily Wong Fillmore, Loss of Family Languages: Should Educators Be Concerned?
Glossary of Grammatical Terms
Index
Authors
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Nora Bacon
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![Cover: The Well-Crafted Sentence, 3rd Edition by Nora Bacon](http://prod-cat-files.macmillan.cloud/MediaResources/Jackets/258W/9781319058623.jpg)
The Well-Crafted Sentence
Third Edition| 2019
Nora Bacon
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