Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft

Great writing begins--and ends--with the sentence. Whether two words ("Jesus wept.") or 1,287 words (a sentence in William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!), sentences have the power to captivate, entertain, motivate, educate, and, most importantly, delight. Understanding the variety of ways to construct sentences, from the smallest clause to the longest sentence, is important to enhancing your appreciation of great writing and potentially improving your own. This course applies the sentence-oriented approach to studying writing and provides a larger context for what makes sentences great. Students investigate how to recognize the mechanics of sentences, how language works on thoughts and emotions, and learn basic strategies to sharpen their ability to recognize great sentences and make their own writing more effective.… (more)