Cover: The Well-Crafted Sentence, 3rd Edition by Nora Bacon
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The Well-Crafted Sentence

A Writer's Guide to StyleThird Edition ©2019 Nora Bacon

What makes a sentence strong? Nora Bacon’s The Well-Crafted Sentence: A Writer’s Guide to Style demystifies grammatical concepts and stylistic choices by taking apart expert writers’ sentences as illustrations and asking students to practice crafting and revising their own. Examples throug...

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ISBN:9781319249946

ISBN:9781319058623

Cover: The Well-Crafted Sentence, 3rd Edition by Nora Bacon

Teach style in context

What makes a sentence strong? Nora Bacon’s The Well-Crafted Sentence: A Writer’s Guide to Style demystifies grammatical concepts and stylistic choices by taking apart expert writers’ sentences as illustrations and asking students to practice crafting and revising their own. Examples throughout the text are excerpted from 11 readings collected in an anthology at the end of the book, so you can teach style in the context of a larger argument or narrative. With four new model texts, expanded explanations of grammatical concepts, and new coverage of figures of speech, the third edition invites students to experiment with sentence structures that make writing stronger.

Features

Practical and empowering lessons, built around examples from expert writers, give students the tools to craft rhetorically successful sentences. The chapters guide students through the techniques and strategies necessary to understand and achieve stylistic effects, using illustrations and models from the brief anthology at the back of the book.

A brief anthology of readings by accomplished writers provides a source for examples and exercises, as well as inspiration for students. Eleven model texts by distinguished writers in multiple genres, such as Louise Erdrich, David Sedaris, Amy Tan, and Barack Obama, show rather than tell students what attention to style can do for them. Headnotes for each reading highlight and explain the authors’ stylistic choices.

Integrated exercises offer hands-on practice with a variety of sentence styles. Exercises integrated throughout the chapters ask students to analyze passages, to imitate sentence structures, to develop and combine sentences, and to edit others’ work as well as to apply what they’ve learned to their own writing.

Friendly, approachable, and elegant, the text highlights the benefits of attention to style and offers a range of revision strategies that give students the tools to strengthen and develop their writing.

New to This Edition

Four new readings provide up-to-date models in a variety of genres and showcase style in academic writing. Carefully chosen for excellence in prose, the new model texts include an excerpt from Being Mortal by Atul Gawande; the speech, "Soldiers on the Fault Line: War, Rhetoric, and Reality," by Ben Fountain; an excerpt from H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald; and the essay, "Second Thoughts on Mark Twains Masterpiece," by Jane Smiley.

New and revised exercises offer more opportunities for students to experiment with sentences. Throughout the book, drawing from the new model texts, additional exercises allow students to build the skills they need to revise their own essays and stories.

Expanded discussions of grammatical concepts build on the book’s successful approach to teaching style by adding more example sentences from model texts to explain trickier points.

New coverage of figures of speech show students the power of using special effects in their writing. A discussion of figures of speech, including parallelism, antithesis, and asyndeton, shows how occasionally breaking with convention and using special effects allows writers to communicate more powerfully or more beautifully, and take their readers by surprise.

Expanded instructor’s resources for are available for download at macmillanlearning.com. In addition to downloadable exercises and sample responses for selected exercises, the instructor’s resources include sample assignments asking students to write stylistic analyses of texts they admire.

  • Students can find grammar instruction online; the kind of thing The Well-Crafted Sentence does is not easily found. (Chris Ervin, Oregon State University)

  • This isnt a handbook. Its a book about craft at the sentence level. Its a book that helps students see the potential outcome of successful and careful editing at the sentence level and how such careful editing pays for itself at the larger level of discourse, be that the paragraph, essay, or book. (Chris Ervin, Oregon State University)

  • This is a really fine book on sentence structure -- just the thing that many undergraduates need. Without dumbing down the concepts its teaching, its approachable and instructive. When I assign it, my students finish the semester writing clearer and more elegant sentences. (Isaac Cates, University of Vermont)

  • A small, affordable book that will help your students understand how to write well and how "good" writing is created. (Krysten Anderson, Roane State Community College)

  • The Well-Crafted Sentence provides very practical advice that allows a student to move beyond their basic understanding of the language and become the creator of their own writing. (Jennifer Lynn Browning, Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface for Instructors

About the Author

Introduction

1. Approaches to Style

Style as Identity

Style as Embellishment

The Plain Style

Style in Context: Making Rhetorically Smart Choices

Style in Academic Writing

2. The Sentence’s Working Parts

Clause Structure

Transformations within the Clause

Extending the Clause

Joining Independent Clauses

Modifiers

Dependent Clauses

3. Well-Focused Sentences: The Subject-Verb Pair

Populated Prose

Active Voice and Passive Voice

Variation in Sentence Focus

Sharpening the Focus

Double-Check Sentences with Abstract Subjects

Double-Check Sentences with There in the Subject Position

Keep Subject Phrases Short

Uncover Subjects Buried in Introductory Phrases

Transform Nouns to Verbs

4. Well-Balanced Sentences: Coordination and Parallel Structure

Coordination

Parallel Structure

Correlative Conjunctions

Stylistic Effects in Coordinate Series

Long Series

The Echo Effect: Pairs

The Echo Effect: Repetition

Repetition and Paragraph Cohesion

5. Well-Developed Sentences: Modification

Early Modifiers and Paragraph Cohesion

The Crescendo Effect: The Pleasures of the Periodic Sentence

Leaping and Lingering: The Pleasures of the Cumulative Sentence

6. Adding Color with Adjectivals

The Structure of Adjective Clauses

Choices in Crafting Adjective Clauses

Who or Whom?

With or without Commas?

Which or That—or Not?

Reducing Adjective Clauses

Adjective Phrases

7. Adding Action with Verbal Phrases

Functions of Verbal Phrases

Managing Emphasis with Verbal Phrases

Reducing Clauses to Create Verbal Phrases

Editing Checks for Verbal Phrases

8. Layering Meaning with Appositives and Absolutes

Noun Phrases in Apposition

Identifying People

Defining Terms

Filling in Examples

Renaming with a Twist

9. Special Effects: Expectations and Exceptions

Focus on the Subject

Completeness and Explicitness

Sentence Variety

Figures of Speech

ANTHOLOGY

Model Texts for Writers

Louise Erdrich, Shamengwa

Ben Fountain, Soldiers on the Fault Line: War, Rhetoric, and Reality

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Sin Boldly

Atul Gawande, from Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Helen MacDonald, from H is for Hawk

Barack Obama, A More Perfect Union

Tim O’Brien, On the Rainy River

David Sedaris, Genetic Engineering

Jane Smiley, Say it Ain’t So, Huck

Amy Tan, Mother Tongue

Lily Wong Fillmore, Loss of Family Languages: Should Educators Be Concerned?

Glossary of Grammatical Terms

Index

Headshot of Nora Bacon

Nora Bacon

Nora Bacon is a Professor of English, Emeritus and former writing program administrator at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her research, begun at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, has examined service-learning pedagogy, the development of "writing agility," and the relationship between texts and the contexts in which they are written and read. Nora’s current research focuses on the stylistic choices preferred in different disciplines, uniting her interest in variation and her abiding fascination with sentences.

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The Well-Crafted Sentence Transition Guide from the 2e to the 3e