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Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

Brooks Landon

3.99 · Rating details · 486 ratings · 72 reviews

Based on the bestselling series from The Great Courses, Building Great Sentences celebrates the sheer joy of language—and will forever change the way you read and write.

Great writing begins with the sentence. Whether it’s two words (“Jesus wept.”) or William Faulkner’s 1,287-word sentence in Absalom! Absalom!, sentences have the power to captivate, entertain, motivate, e ...more

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Published June 25th 2013 by Plume

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Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon

The Great Courses: Literature & Language

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The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth

Language Published in Decade: 2010s

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Sep 28, 2013 David rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: asyndetonics, alliteratists, epanalepsisists, symplocians, tricolonists

Shelves: ebook, owned, writing, non-fiction

To put it another way, propositions are the atoms from which the molecule of the sentence is constructed.

So here I go reading another one of those "How to write" books. Except this one was different, and before I get into the gritty-nitty of it, I'd like to talk about prose. Specifically, prose style. Because that is what Brooks Landon is really talking about when he talks about sentences.

Those of us who read a lot, and especially those of us who assay/aspire/pretend to be writers ourselves, pro ...more

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Mar 30, 2010 Jason Koivu rated it really liked it

Shelves: writing

Indispensable! Once you've built your foundation on solid stuff like Strunk and White's The Element of Style and put in a good deal of practice when you first start up, then Building Great Sentences is your next step.

This lecture lays down a comprehendible road map for proper structure that flows like a German sports car winding along the autobahn. Before you know it, you'll be constructing high-flying sentences as amazingly acrobatic as a Cirque du Soleil act.

Just be careful you don't go too f ...more

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Sep 25, 2008 Bruce rated it it was amazing

Wow! Brooks Landon’s Teaching Company course, “Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft,” which I just now finished, is one of the most outstanding and, frankly, fun courses I’ve ever taken, Landon being a superbly gifted teacher who lectures with wit and clarity, with insight and imagination, with enthusiasm and verve, leading the student through not only an historical and enlighteningly academic discussion of the development of sentence writing but also a step-by-step examination ...more

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Jul 17, 2017 Richard Gilbert rated it it was amazing

Brooks Landon's belief in long sentences goes against decades of teaching and advice. The dominant plain style prizes simplicity and clarity over elegance and eloquence. But Landon favors elaboration, and one type of long sentence—the cumulative, a detail-packed propulsive structure that enhances delivery of information, emotion, and rhythm. Such a sentence might impel you to savor it, or to stop and marvel at its maker’s skill.

Because cumulatives begin with a simple base sentence, they’re easy Brooks Landon's belief in long sentences goes against decades of teaching and advice. The dominant plain style prizes simplicity and clarity over elegance and eloquence. But Landon favors elaboration, and one type of long sentence—the cumulative, a detail-packed propulsive structure that enhances delivery of information, emotion, and rhythm. Such a sentence might impel you to savor it, or to stop and marvel at its maker’s skill.

Because cumulatives begin with a simple base sentence, they’re easy to understand even as they add modifying phrases that lengthen them—to 40 words, 60, even100 and more. Here’s a fun one by Landon himself, from his How to Build Great Sentences, with the first five words being the base sentence:

"He drove the car carefully, his shaggy hair whipped by the wind, his eyes hidden behind wraparound mirror shades, his mouth set in a grim smile, a .38 Police Special on the seat beside him, the corpse stuffed in the trunk".

Landon teaches a popular class in prose style at the University of Iowa; with his focus on the sentence, and especially on the unique properties and benefits of its cumulative form, he’s among a handful of distinguished holdouts against the plain style. Their research into what genius writers and highly skilled professional wordsmiths often do began with an obscure 1946 essay, “The Craft of Writing,” by John Erskine. A novelist, pianist, and composer who taught at Columbia University, Erskine argued that it isn't actually the noun or the verb but the modifier that is "the essential part of any sentence."

Rhetorician Francis Christensen took up Erskine's point—and changed writing instruction for a while in the 1960s and ’70s. Many high school students and college freshmen were taught to improve their writing by imitating masterful long sentences and by combining short sentences to make compound and complex ones. Although this worked, the movement crashed under an academic counter-attack in the 1980s. Landon touches on the reasons, and cites an elegiac essay, “The Erasure of the Sentence,” by Robert J. Connors. Connors essentially says that having students imitate wasn’t sexy enough to prevail in academe. Christensen’s methods, he says, were seen as mechanistic, “lore-based,” and lacking in supporting theory.

The stunning irony, to any practitioner reading about this academic dispute, is that writers, including literary artists, have always learned by imitation. In writing classes, and certainly in creative writing workshops, the precocious stars are those who, having fallen in love with words, sentences, and stories long before, have already spent years informally studying them. In swimming through libraries, such writers absorbed structures and rhythms that make prose sing or pack a punch.

Building Great Sentences concentrates such a process and makes learning overt. Chapter Five, “The Rhythm of Cumulative Syntax,” drills down into their structure. Upon finishing it, on Page 67, you might wonder how Landon will fill his book’s remaining pages—ten subsequent chapters. Indeed, you have the gist of his point and grasp the reason for his passion. But Landon continues: to teach more about cumulatives; to consider a few other sentence patterns; to offer further insights into balance, suspense, and the rhetorical effects of using two examples, or three, or four (and more).

In other words, everything after Chapter Five is elaboration—and more nitty gritty for actual writers, who should draw near and study. The focus on one key pattern allows Landon to go deep without losing the serious student. And thankfully, Landon’s own prose is elegant and accessible. He uses as few grammatical terms as possible. This is a study of prose effects and how to achieve them—of rhetoric, that is, not grammar per se. He deftly cites other contemporary and past theorists, distilling their thought and giving motivated teachers and writers a way to locate and learn from them as well.

For me, as a memoirist, a fascinating corollary aspect of Building Better Sentences is how cumulatives can help finesse persona. The writer's reflective persona is crucial in memoir because readers reflexively judge memoirists and the past selves they are portraying. Landon says cumulative sentences present a writer who's trying harder, lend themselves to reflection, and remind readers "of the creative mind that crafted that sentence." That’s "one of the functions of style: to remind us of the mind behind the sentences we read," he says. The macho plain style, in contrast, isn't inclined toward pursuit of deeper meaning and has a take-it-or-leave-it quality.

I don’t entirely agree with Landon about plain style's flaws in fiction—at least his examples don't actually illustrate his point. Yet his overall notion, based on his preference for depth of inquiry, seems valid. I’m totally on board with his championing of the cumulative sentence and with its implications for nonfiction. Especially when blended with simple and compound sentences, cumulatives offer many options for rhythmic variety and emphasis.

Landon treats Strunk and White's The Elements of Style kindly, even though it’s an exemplar of and an advocate for plain style. Aimed at beginning writers, remember, The Elements of Style is a fine and bracing brief for clarity of thought and expression. And professional writers do discover the beauty of simple declarative sentences, after all. They’re always looking for places to use them. They also, of course, make sentences of other lengths and patterns.

Usually the results of learning to write by imitating great sentences are credited to individual talent. That obscures the way craft is actually acquired in a monkey-see, monkey-do process. For writers serious about improving, learning craft becomes steadily more focused and overt, as well as more self-prescribed and self-directed. After reading Building Great Sentences, I’ll write more and better cumulative sentences.

Landon performs a valuable service for writers, teachers, and rhetoricians in explaining his obsession with cumulatives, spotlighting their relative simplicity, their flowing beauty, their subtle but steady reassurance about the writer, and their effectiveness in conveying rhythm, emotion, and information. Building Great Sentences is one of the top writing books in my library, and it’s the most useful study of the sentence I’ve ever read. ...more

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Jul 31, 2013 Sher rated it it was amazing

I loved this book. Dr. Landon brings things to mind about the construction of a sentence that I had never considered before. I am very interested in writing and have done a bit of amateur writing myself. It is something I would like to do more of in the future, and having read this book, I now believe I have a better chance at being good at it.

Dr. Landon is funny and serious, having a great way about him that holds the attention, which allows the learning to take place. This book is certainly no ...more

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Jun 25, 2016 Gregg rated it it was ok

This course does not lend itself very well to a strict lecture format, practical application would be better. This is also a creative writing course and has relatively little application to legal writing the genre where my writing resides. The course was not clear on its scope before I purchased it.

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May 07, 2010 Aloha rated it it was amazing

I wished I had read this a long time ago. This is a terrific exploration of different sentence structures that is beyond grammar. It gives me a greater insight into how literary greats create flow and mood in their stories. I have to go back and reread this again.

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Feb 04, 2017 April Satanek rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: writers

Alternate title for the book: Why I Inordinately Love Long Sentences and Why You Should Too.

Summary: This book could be 1/3 less in length and be as effective, if not more. One could say the same for this book review.

I relish an opportunity to learn more about the writing craft, since I carry with every piece I write, no formal writing instruction beyond basic college English classes. So this book came as a welcome gift.

I read the first three chapters twice in order to get the most informati ...more

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Apr 17, 2017 SusanwithaGoodBook rated it really liked it

Every once in awhile when I read, I come across a sentence so well crafted, so evocative, so moving, that I just have to stop and re-read it to let the words roll over my tongue and through my mind again. Certain sentences are just a joy to the eye and a treat for the ear. This love of sentences led me to ask: What makes a good sentence, and can I learn to write such a sentence?

I still don't know the answer to that question, but after this course I have a better idea of what makes a sentence me ...more

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Aug 10, 2013 Lisa rated it really liked it

Professor Brooks Landon urges writers to create more elegant and stylish sentences in this book by adding free modifiers, and he provides several wonderful examples from great novelists, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and even Earnest Hemingway. Professor Landon also discusses the use of literary techniques, such as simile, metaphor and alliteration. He especially wants writers to improve their style, and he suggests many ways in which to do this.

He provides lots of helpful exerc ...more

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Aug 10, 2015 Joel Gun rated it it was amazing

This book allows a writer, or an admirer of the written word, to appreciate the intricacies of the sentence. I'm glad I stumbled upon this book, because it's helped to revived my appreciation for the craft of writing. It's easy to get trapped into a little box sometimes. Books like this serve to remind that there is a universe of limitless knowledge when it comes to writing. Most of us can only attempt to scratch the surface. I like that. For me, as a writer, that's what gives life adventure.

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Sep 01, 2017 Newton Nitro rated it really liked it

Shelves: writing-guides

Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft - Brooks Landon | #guiaparaescritores #dicasparaescritores #resenha | The Teaching Company, 2008 | Lido de 29.08.17 a 31.08.17

RESENHA
Um dos maiores best-sellers da série The Great Courses, Building Great Sentences celebra a linguagem, e mudará para sempre a maneira como você lê e escreve. Uma excelente escrita começa com a frase. Se são apeans duas palavras ("Jesus chorou") ou a frase de William Faulkner de 1.287 palavras em "Absalão! Absalã ...more

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Dec 23, 2014 Lora rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, informative-how-to

A good book. I did skim some of the more technical parts sometimes, but also learned some great new terms to help anchor my writing. I love the idea of cumulative sentences. They add breath to the clay, life to the limp, and color to the dull. So many minimalist writers could use a bit more accumulation of thought. You know, meat on them barely verbal bones.
Most modern writers need some sort of soul as well. Cumulative sentences may not be enough salvation for them.

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Nov 20, 2018 Justin Rose rated it really liked it

Although I've read hundreds of books, composed scores of book reports in college and grad school, and studied about becoming a better speaker and reader, I've learned relatively little about mastering the skill of writing. Landon, a college English professor, has changed my pragmatic writing style of short, punctual sentences, by convincing me to compose longer, yet grammatically correct sentences which become a pleasure to read and understand.

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Jul 30, 2013 Craig rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: Anyone who wants to learn the tools of a writer.

This will make you a better wordsmith.

Note: I'm basing this off the audio version of "Building Great Sentences" (which was a treat to listen to, Landon is very engaging).

What it is: Building Great Sentences is simply fantastic. It is laser focused on just sentence structure, beautiful sentence structure, sentence structure that makes you swoon. You'll learn ways to make big, beautiful sentences, loose sentences, balanced sentences. You'll also learn a variety of tools for adding your detail to s This will make you a better wordsmith.

Note: I'm basing this off the audio version of "Building Great Sentences" (which was a treat to listen to, Landon is very engaging).

What it is: Building Great Sentences is simply fantastic. It is laser focused on just sentence structure, beautiful sentence structure, sentence structure that makes you swoon. You'll learn ways to make big, beautiful sentences, loose sentences, balanced sentences. You'll also learn a variety of tools for adding your detail to short sentences, gaining the ability to vary the way you construct almost all of your sentences. Best of all, Brooks Landon is really funny, and the course is a pure delight to listen to. I've listened to it many times and I enjoy it every time.

What it is not: I've seen this course criticized for advocating for long and complex sentences, which isn't really true. It is true that it only deals with making sentences longer and better while being long, and it is true that if you craft all or even most of your sentences to be such masterworks, you'll be writing insufferable prose, but that's not what the lecture is advocating. Landon mentions several times that the writer absolutely must vary their sentence length, that the course is focused on longer sentences because short sentences are really not all that difficult to craft (or all that teachable), and that it is important to know how to create longer, well constructed sentences when desired. This course is simply focussed on that one single aspect, a specialized tool. The course teaches you how to build those beautiful loose, balanced, or otherwise complex sentences when you want to. The course doesn't deal at all with any of the other important aspects of writing (story, characterization, pacing, etc), only how to build great sentences (when you want to).

I found this lecture series to have terrifically improved my ability to craft sentences of all variety and type. I don't often use these new tools in my toolbox to craft complex sentences, but when I want to, I know how to do them, and I'm a better writer for it. Also, many of the techniques learned are well suited to creating variety among your shorter sentences (the multitude of examples of different ways to add just one piece of detail to "the woman closed the door" are wonderfully illuminating).

TL;DR: This will make you a better wordsmith. This is an incredible tool for improving one small, but important aspect of your writing, building more complex sentences, which, when used sparingly, can add incredible richness to your writing. It will also teach you how to vary your writing, showing you the multitude of ways to add detail to your short sentences. I can't recommend it strongly enough.

...more

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Sep 28, 2009 Bob Nichols rated it it was ok

This course challenges some widely accepted advice (e.g., Strunk and White) that short sentences stripped of chaff are the key to good writing. Landon says that approach removes richness and personality from prose. Rather, Landon advocates the enrichment of writing by adding modifiers and strings of modifiers to the base clause and kernal sentence. Landon states that very, very long master sentences even have a place. Along the way, he adds other suggestions to help the writer, e.g., rythmic wri This course challenges some widely accepted advice (e.g., Strunk and White) that short sentences stripped of chaff are the key to good writing. Landon says that approach removes richness and personality from prose. Rather, Landon advocates the enrichment of writing by adding modifiers and strings of modifiers to the base clause and kernal sentence. Landon states that very, very long master sentences even have a place. Along the way, he adds other suggestions to help the writer, e.g., rythmic writing that imitates the Morse Code, balanced and parallel sentences written in "twos" (black and white, etc.) and "threes" ("Veni, vidi, vici," etc). Landon talks about the need for good writers to depart from the "received wisdom" provided by writing texts and guidebooks and, instead, to engage in "rule breaking." Landon's presentation would have benefited by collapsing his lectures by half. Despite its length, he does not discuss the role of emotions and evocation (creating pictures) in writing. Also, while he clearly implies that there is no single objective standard for good writing, he does not develop the implied thesis that, style wise, there are different strokes for different folks. At times, his renditions of prose that he found lacking suffered from his obviously editorial (monotone) voice. The course at times gets bogged down in writing jargon (e.g.,in Lecture 20: anaphora, anadiplosis, assonance, chiasmus, epanalepsis, epistrophe, isocolon, polyptoton, symploce, etc.), making it difficult to follow, and reminding us again why "learning English" is such a struggle. Toward the end, Landon makes passing and positive references to the next evolution of writing in the computer age and the techniques increasingly available to writers, but says nothing about the "junk in/junk out" phenomena or computer default systems that standardize and imprison language. Landon's value is to challenge some of the religiosity when it comes to writing and encourages writers to develop their own marverick spirit and to trust more in their own instincts. This is his central message. ...more

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Jun 27, 2013 Jay Alexander Bostwick rated it it was amazing

Shelves: writing, favorites

Landon explores a topic that is often overlooked in writing instruction: the craft of building sentences. The last time I remember discussing sentences specifically in a formal writing course was in seventh grade, and there our attention was mainly on diagramming sentences rather than composing and refining them. For writers and non writers alike, it's as if sentences are part of the air we breathe, so abundant and commonplace that we hardly pay them any attention, despite how essential they are ...more

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Aug 20, 2013 Ariadna73 rated it it was amazing

Shelves: writing, english-language, self-help

Building Great Sentences - Brooks Landon

This book's author is a sentence junkie. He loves to write them, to absorb them, to adorn them, to use them. He tried to restrain himself from his vice in this delicious book, but I think he failed. He created a deliciously written piece of art on how to compost beautiful and solid building blocks for our own creations. It is a reference book, I think.

Picture of the cover of the book I read

Picture of the table of contents of the book I read

If you feel like seeing more books, you are welcome to visit my blog: http://lunairereadings.blogspot.com/ ...more

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Jul 20, 2017 Aatif Rashid rated it it was amazing

I've read a lot of craft books on the art writing, and this is one of the best, because it focuses ultimately on the actual things that writing is made of: sentences. Forget plot, character, setting, etc., all those abstract ideas about what makes writing great--at its core, great writing is about the prose. This book looks at different kinds of sentences, chief among them the cumulative sentences, and explores their effects, with plenty of great examples, like this one below:

"Her face was sad a ...more

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Oct 04, 2015 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: 21st-century, non-fiction, writing

Building Great Sentences was an interesting read, but given the movement is away from long sentences and toward shorter sentences Brooks Landon appears to be swimming against the tide.

The approach of building sentences from propositions instead of words is interesting, but his obsession with larger sentences doesn't really fit in with the post-Twitter age.

Recommended for those interested in how to build elegant and eloquent larger sentences. A little dry in parts, as should be expected from th ...more

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Jul 11, 2013 Washington Post rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-for-writers

Landon’s earnest primer hews to the more-is-more approach to composition, in which a basic declarative sentence is merely a platform for an entire superstructure of subclauses and qualifying phrases. This works well for William Gass or Thomas Berger — two writers Landon idolizes — but seems potentially hazardous in the hands of lesser mortals. Landon admits that “everyone who writes about prose style advances a particular view of it.” Read the rest: http://wapo.st/11GsWRC

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Jan 06, 2016 Brenda rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

A wealth of fascinating information can be found inside this book. Quirky, interesting and, unfortunately, at times a wee on the dry side, it is nevertheless, a must read for anyone who is interested in the mechanics of prose. This book will be one that I continuously turn to over the years.

There's a ton of referenced books and essays within this book that I will have to find time to read, so it works as a wonderful resource for further learning.

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Mar 21, 2016 Gary rated it liked it

I really like the idea of teaching cumulative sentences. I think this is a great idea. If the book were about half its current length, it could be a classic. I wish the author would edit it down to half, so this book's idea could get the attention it deserves.

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Nov 05, 2016 Mario Russo rated it it was amazing

Shelves: writing, ttc

I wasn't sure of what I was going to find but I must to admit that it was much more fun than expected. Professor Brooks is on the top of his game and knows deeply the subject. Recommended.

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Jun 13, 2016 Peter rated it it was amazing

I feel like I should have been taught this in high school AP English. At least in college.

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Dec 19, 2018 Jenni rated it really liked it

Brooks Landon's book "Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read" is a spectacle of writing style, a pleasure for your eyes. Brooks makes sure to use his own advice, crafting a great composition of short and long sentences, which despite their length are always easy to understand, using his proposed constructs in myriads of ways, e.g. parallelisms, suspenseful sentences, and by that illustrating the power of his proposed craftsmanship. Not only is his own writ Brooks Landon's book "Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read" is a spectacle of writing style, a pleasure for your eyes. Brooks makes sure to use his own advice, crafting a great composition of short and long sentences, which despite their length are always easy to understand, using his proposed constructs in myriads of ways, e.g. parallelisms, suspenseful sentences, and by that illustrating the power of his proposed craftsmanship. Not only is his own writing a pleasure in this regard, he also gives plenty of examples from other famous authors, comparing and positioning different perspectives on the nature and structure of sentences. He equips the reader with exercises after most sections, for them to get a grasp on the concepts. In the end, he suggests further reading to back his claims with empirical evidence and, for the interested reader, he presents a brief summary on schools of writing and style.

Following up on that, Brooks critiques the prevalence---or what he quotes as the "imperative of the imperatives"---of only writing short, concise and clear texts, rather he emphasises that selected rules can and should be bent, for the writer's style is intrinsically linked to the personality of the authors and his or her content.

Bothersome about the book is that the author proceeds in miniscule steps, rendering the text repetitive after the first half. He goes into pedantic detail for explaining marginal differences in sentence structure. Some constructs are conflated and could have been summarised more briefly.

In summary this is a great book providing perspectives and ideas contrary to the prevalent dogma of precise and concise text. It is very well written, all the way down to the single word. However, the length of the book could be reduced by 50-80 pages due to the overly detailed descriptions in the middle. In summary, I can still recommend this book, if you just skim over the repetitive parts. Focus on the first and last part.

...more

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Nov 10, 2017 David rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: aspiring authors

If you have the DVD, then we're talking 5 stars. This guidebook that accompanies the DVD, while complete, lacks Landon's delivery and many examples that he presents in the lecture. It's like the "Cliff Notes" version of the lectures. Let me put it another way: The lectures have been boiled down, and this guidebook is the precipitate. While it covers the essential nuggets and provides what you need to know, it doesn't deliver the goods in the same way as Landon's lectures.

Landon opened my eyes to ...more

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Aug 19, 2018 Scott Wozniak rated it really liked it

This might be better titled, The beauty and structure of complex sentences. He opens with an acknowledgement of the beauty of some very short, simple sentences. But then says that what he wants to teach is how to write the long, complex sentences. He makes a strong case that just because there are many examples of terrible, run on sentences doesn't mean that longer is worse. And then, with examples and techniques, he proves his point.

I confess that until reading this book, I had assumed shorter ...more

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Oct 25, 2018 Nev March rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: writers

This was a delightful read. While some sections went into more detail than needed, on the views of writing instructors and rhetoricians, a great deal of the book was easy to read, and immensely valuable training for anyone trying to write better, more clearly and more effectively.

The very structure of some of these sentences extracts from the writer more detail, more nuance, and leads the writing forward. Chapters on suspensive sentences and building tension through placement of clauses and mod ...more

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Oct 08, 2017 Drury rated it it was ok

This was actually the most disappointing lecture I've come across so far in the Great Courses catalog, it was primarily aimed at prose writers, whose editors allow them to write never-ending sentences, and we, the reader, are to admire the greatness of these massive, never-ending sentences, despite issues with unwieldy sentences that seem to go on and on, never really going anywhere, but leading the reader as it were down a train of thought that could just as easily be segmented into normal sent ...more

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“The principle is this: When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed. Erskine” — 0 likes

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