Several Short Sentences About Writing

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

How many sentences begin with the subject? How many begin with an opening phrase before the subject? Or with a word like “When” or “Since” or “While” or “Because”? How many begin with “There” or “It”? What kinds of nouns do you see? Abstractions? Generalizations? Multisyllabic Latinate nouns ending in “-ion”? Or are they the solid names of actual things? Is the subject of the sentence an actor capable of performing the action of the verb? Can you adjust the sentence so it is? Or does the subject of the sentence hide the action of entities that are able to act—humans, for instance? How close is the subject to its verb? Are they separated by an inserted phrase? What does that do to the velocity of the sentence? How many of the verbs are variants of “to be”—“is,” “are,” “were,” “was,” and so on? Are the verbs active, energetic? Or do they merely connect or arrange or present or relate? Are the constructions passive? How often does the word “as” appear, and in which of its many senses? Are you using “with” as a preposition or as a false conjunction, a false relative pronoun? Are there inadvertent repetitions—words repeated unintentionally? Is every phrase in its proper place, every word? Is everything next to what it should be next to? Anything outright ungrammatical? Words used improperly? Do verbs that require direct objects (transitive verbs) lack them? If there’s a modifying phrase at the start of the sentence, does it modify the subject of the sentence? (It must.) Can the...