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WHAT MIGHT BE SWAMPING YOUR SENTENCES
                                                     by Robert W. Walker

I see a lot of writing any given day as I teach English at the college level along with writing courses and literature courses, and sometimes I get feeling no pain and let this pass and that pass as there is only so much I can do about the dumbing down of American schools and curriculum....a situation that has been going on for decades now.  When a student tells me she has in four years of high school not had to write one single research paper, it makes my jaw drop.  "What did you do for four  years?"  Her reply -- Watched films.

The problem that manifests itself in the writing of such a one as this sweet kid is writing with a proliferation of non-words, leech words, words that suck the meaing out of all she wants so desperately to say and get out of her mind.  Bloated sentences that are run ons, others that are fragments, but the worst crime to clarity is a preponderance of pronouns put into play.  For example:  Mary told her mother that she was fat and ugly.... No way to know who in that sentence is SHE...which she is fat, I mean.  Another example of a waterlogged sentence, waterlogged with pronouns.  We have three little girls in a short story and the student -- another studnent this time -- writes the following:  The little girl was upset because the other little girl told the other little girl that she did not belong at the party as a guest but that the first little girl, whose mother was a servant at the party, was there to serve food and not to party with the other little girl.

Makes you want to say Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, I know....I know.  Talk about a sentence that was dead in the water before it began.  And it could all have been cleared up and made alive by a simple use of NAMES....Name each lil' girl.  Rosari, Madeliene, Tasha -- thank you.  Naming names, even repeating names thoughout your story keeps a reader focused; names have power and magic and are far, far more like a Kodak moment in the brain than she or he or we or they or it.  Name it, name him, name her, and name the town, the river, the lake, the park, the cemetery.  Names have resonance and meaning.  We can connect with names of people, places, and things but not so much with IT or THEM, especially when there are more than one set of its or thems in the story or sentence for that matter.  You can't go wrong with coming back to naming names, using nouns.  The two most powerful words in any given sentence are the subject noun and the verb...followed by the object noun.  If you replace the subject noun and the object noun think about what happens to the following:  Mark looked sharply at Christopher where he stood leaning against the fencepost.  NOW let's replace the names with pronouns and we get less definition and clarity and focus (more confusion):  He looked sharply at him where he stood leaning against it.

Dead in the water.  Pronouns cause all sorts of questions to be raised in the mind of the beholder. The power of a full name like Jack Buckland or Kelly Irvin or Milicent Carver is where it is at, especially in fiction and it sure helps in nonfiction and research papers as well.  These are the things that try an English professor's soul and cause doctors of philosophy to pull out their hair. That and the missteps and missues of words like stuff, thing, alot a lot, get ( I dislike get); not to mention the failure to distinctly speak and understand such pronouns at THEIR as opposed to THEY'RE and THERE or Its and it's.  Even hole and whole!  Even roll and role!  Worst yet the u

Yep. You gotta get feedback on your novel and you gotta act on it. On everything? Yep. But what if. . .

Yes! Oh! No? Uh-oh! Huh?

Okay. Here are five reactions I’ve had to recent feedback: Yes! Oh! No? Uh-oh! Huh?

• Yes! It’s great when feedback confirms what you were already thinking needed work. You knew this area was weak, and sure enough, the reader confirmed it. These changes or revisions to your novel are made easier by this confirmation.



• Oh! These are unexpected, new ideas for ways to solve a problem in a particular way. I love it when the reader gets what I’m doing in this novel and suggests a perfect revision. These are often ideas about adding, omitting, changing or rearranging.

For example, one comment recently was to take a line from page 76 and use it as the opening line. I’m still not sure it will work, but it’s shaken me out of my rut on that first line and now I’m more likely to find the right place to start.

Related posts:

1. 2 Types of Feedback
2. Critique Groups
3. Listen

Do you have a thinking toy? I do.


It's a rainbow-colored mini Slinky. It was given to me along with a thank-you note for speaking at a conference. At the time, I thought: cute. But why?

Now I keep it near at hand, along with my timer and my bottle of Clarity.



Whenever I get stuck (or paused or temporarily waylaid) in my Work in Progress, I grab the slinky and start stretching it in and out like an accordion. I toss it from hand to hand. I twist it and watch the lines of color warp and shift like one of those psychedelic screen savers.

And it works. It gives my procrastination and mental maze wandering a physical outlet, like staring at a mandala or a Smoky Mountain creek.

Clarity. In a bottle. In a spring (slinky or mountain-fed.) Or in focused work to the beat of a timer.

How do you achieve Clarity?

Of course, this isn’t really about anything being simple. I just thought I’d take a magazine cover-line approach and use a completely misleading headline to increase readership.

I’m giving a talk soon about writing children’s non-fiction, and as an exercise I’ve tried to articulate a list of rules & guidelines I follow when writing. These are rules that apply to my own writing — I’m not suggesting that anyone else should follow them. Well, maybe one or two of them.

• Don’t underestimate the ability of young children to understand abstract concepts.

• Put new concepts and information into a context that makes sense to children. Try to use metaphors or comparisons with something familiar. Sadly, the standard measurement unit of my childhood for things of modest size — the bread box — is unfamiliar to most kids today.

• Don’t mix different units of measurement or meaning in the same comparison. I see this all the time in adult writing, even in publications like the New York Times, and it always annoys me: “There are only 500 animal A’s found in the wild, and the population of animal B has decreased by 80%.”

• Clarify terms that seem simple but have multiple interpretations. This is a common problem with scale-related information: “Animal A is twice as big as Animal B”. What does ‘big’ mean? If it’s based on length, and if the animals are similarly proportioned, then animal A weighs eight times as much as animal B.

• Introduce a few new terms and vocabulary words, but not too many for the reading level of the audience. If possible, use new terms without formal definition in a context that makes their meaning clear. It’s more fun for kids to figure out for themselves what a word means.

• Don’t anthropomorphize. Like I said, these rules are for me. There are lots of great natural science books that use the first-person voice of animals, natural forces, even the universe. But these books make it clear from the beginning that there is poetic license involved, and that the reader is being invited to use their imagination to see the world from the perspective of some other entity. I’m more concerned about casual references to the way animals ‘feel’, or what they ‘want’, in the course of what purports to be a objective examination of their behavior.

• If possible, anticipate the questions suggested by the facts being presented and answer them. This can be a never-ending sequence, one answer suggesting another question, so at some point one has to move on, but if we point out that an animal living in the jungle is brightly colored, it’s great to be able to say how color helps the animal (as it must, in some way, or it would have been selected out). Does its color warn off predators, attract a mate, or — counter-intuitively — help it hide? A colorful animal that lives among colorful flowers may be hard to spot.

• Try to avoid the standard narrative. For many subjects, a typical story line seems to have developed. Or there is an accepted linear sequence of introducing concepts. Teaching math is an example: arithmetic, geometry, algebra, calculus. There is some logic to this, but even a child that can’t do long division can understand some of the basic applications of (for example) calculus. Often the same creatures or phenomena are used to illustrate a particular point. Symbiosis: the clown fish and anemone. Metamorphosis: butterfly, frog.

• Don't oversell science as fun, or make it goofy or wacky. There is thinking involved, and work. The fun and satisfaction come from understanding new things and seeing new connections.

• Don’t confuse the presentation of facts with the explanation of concepts.

• Don’t follow lists of rules.

That’s it! Just follow these simple guidelines, and everything will be perfect. (Results may vary. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. For external use only.)

Here's a little taste of a b&w line drawing series I'm currently working on for the Royal Alberta Museum of Alberta. For all of you teachers out there interested in renting an "Edu" Kit about Tunisia (a country in Northern Africa) contact me and I'll give you some more information on how to rent this educational/fun set.

And a little site note to those of you who, like myself, feed off of the creative writings of J.K.Rowling: you shall not be disapointed. This installment is packed with adventure and will have you at the edge of your seat biting your nails. At moments you'll weep while others will have you laughing and rolling on the floor. I'm not afraid to admit that I am already on my second read of the book... WOW! There are some great surprises in the end of the book.