Help with sentence flow and prose styling?

Question

I want to improve my grammar, sentence flow and prose styling. Can anyone recommend any good books to help me?

Thank you

Answer 1

Stunk and White elements of style is good but very old. As a writer, I depended on that books plus a book called Eats, Shoot and leaves. This book was INVALUEABLE in aiding me in writing proper sentences. The authors spend her time properly breaking down punctation and grammer.

Very good book

Answer 2

I think that improvement in grammar and prose styles begin with work shopping the text you write.
One of the first tests of good flow is read the work aloud.
There is a natural cadence in speech and hearing the text read will soon point out clumsy sentence structure. Work shopping your text by having others read it back to you would help you develop an ear for dialogue. If you are writing it’s important to understand your genre and central theme/s before you begin writing. Explore different types of structure such as poetry, commercial writing styles and novel. The Short story form is a good start as it usually has the traditional beginning middle and end format but you can experiment with anti-hero or other literary concepts such as first or second person narrator with the short story mode. The main point I would look for is writing is be personal and creative in your style and write on what interest you. Is that “people” ”environment” ”culture” “imagination” you pick?

Answer 3

Strunk and White: The Elements of Style. This was always a good writing resource, for me.

Another method of improving your grammar, sentence structure and style is: read. Read a lot. Read the types of books, essays, editorials or whatever it is that you would most like to emulate. This will also improve your vocabulary and make you smarter, and better looking!

Good luck.

Answer 4

Rediscover Grammar by David Crystal is very clear when explaining grammar rules etc. He has also written lots of other books about grammar, written and spoken english so whack his name into amazon and see what comes up!
(quick tip when writing a sentance - read it out loud to yourself - if you can say it easily without running out of breath etc then punctuation should be ok but if not then you will have to rethink!)
good luck x

Answer 5

an exciting, polemical question (and no, i did no longer race to the glossary for the be conscious "polemical" :P). I consider Steve that a visit to the glossary isn't a foul undertaking once you're finding to sidestep repetition of a definite be conscious, whose meaning you're finding to apply two times interior an identical sentence or paragraph. so a techniques as i'm worried the glossary, purely like the dictionary, is a device for use whilst it rather is mandatory. I comprehend the reason of your question, even with the incontrovertible fact that. you're tying what's usually called "pink prose" to glossary over-utilization, a controversy that's simple to many that're purely commencing out writing. so a techniques as i'm worried that's all area of the academic technique. As a author matures he/she quickly discovers that commonly "much less is greater", and that they have got a tendency to leave the greater flowery aspects of their writing in the back of. So does this style of writing sicken me? no longer rather, because of the fact I comprehend the place it rather is coming from. or perhaps now a author with some adventure will test with a diverse writing style (as I truthfully have carried out) and come out with some thing that's decidedly "purplish". and then fairly some beta readers quickly positioned this wayward author (who, me?) decrease back on the right this moment and slender.

Answer 6

You cannot go wrong with Wren and Martin. Their books have coached millions of people for decades now.

Answer 7

You don't need a book. Elmore Leonard said it all.

These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s “Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories “Close Range.”

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character—the one whose view best brings the scene to life—I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in “Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”

“Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.