13 Ways to Fix a Sentence
How to style, enhance, and dazzle readers with your sentences
I love written language, particularly well-styled sentences.
Anytime I dedicate energy to improving any piece of writing — a poem, article, short story, book, or novel — the improvements inevitably narrow to the mysterious substance of sentences.
The reason is pretty clear, hidden in plain sight. Sentences are the DNA of writing.
Sentences blend words and punctuation (symbols) that, shuffled together, form ideas— the basic building blocks of any piece of writing. Sometimes the ideas arrive in perfectly ordered clarity. Most of the time they arrive drunk, leaning heavily to one side, slumped over, and slurring.
It’s our job as writers to sober up our sentences. To get them straight.
How do we do it? We edit. We edit as if each of our readers paid us extravagant amounts of cash to clear the rubbish from shoddy writing. As if they funded our life completely based on how little of their time we wasted.
When you embrace this fantasy, you realize quickly your reliance on editing. You come at your sentences ready to rip them to shreds.
And that’s exactly the way you want to approach fixing your sentences.
