A Word on the Words

LET’S talk about good writing.

For a start, what is it? Well the construction of a good sentence shouldn’t be complicated.

An expressive sentence can contain any words you like – that’s down to your creativity.

What a good sentence does not require is an intricate array of clauses and sub-clauses.

Sentence construction should be simple.

A sentence always has a subject and a verb. The simplest sentence consists of one noun and one verb: “Steven talked”. Steven is the noun, talked is the verb. Then you just add parts of the language to make wonderful prose.

Add an adverb (adverbs describe verbs) and you get “Steven talked quickly”.

Add an adjective (adjectives describe nouns) and you get: “Agitated Steven talked quickly”.

You could add a clause to make a compound sentence: “Agitated Steven, angry at sloppy sentence construction, talked quickly”.

But if your sentence carries on too long, with too many clauses, it isn’t a good sentence.

If you mix tenses within a sentence, it doesn’t make sense.

If you don’t punctuate properly, a sentence suffers.

A famous example is: “Let’s eat, granma”, which is an invitation issued to granma. Without the comma, you’re suggesting cannibalism: “Let’s eat granma”.