Reddit mentions of Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style

If you're interested in a book there's

Artful sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte

which goes over lots of lovely usage examples.

sample pdf

amazon

a book that highlights and examines great sentences: Artful Sentences

For me, I'm not even gonna break into the library because I'd be there all day. This comes to mind though: "Roaring noon."

By a wide margin, the best book on this topic is Virginia Tufte's "Syntax as Style".

An em dash is a fermata, a grand pause. Think about the power there—how much that can do for the cadence of your prose. I would call it the most dramatic of the marks.

Semicolons are used to set apart two very related sentences, sure, but if that’s the case, why not use a period? Any two sentences next to each other, we expect as readers, will be closely related. Two sentences separated by a semicolon are of equal weight, and the semicolon is a sort of intellectual play. The two sentences feed off one another; their meanings play off one another like two kids seesawing. My rules for determining whether to use a semicolon: It feels right (I want to, I like it, my intuition urges me to); The two sentences are really very similar in meaning and play off one another; I could, theoretically, switch the order of the sentences, even if I wouldn’t. If you can’t switch the order, you might be looking for a colon, instead.

Above I use semicolons in their other capacity, which is to set apart items of a list in which at least one of the items in the list is complex (contains a period, comma, parenthetical expression, etc).

I cannot overstate how wonderful Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte is. If you’re trying to learn to write artfully, get yourself a copy today.

Are you asking whether you could learn new language with this method? Its best you follow a language learning system for that.

It worked for me with english because I grew up learning it from childhood and obsessively read nearly hundred or more novels in my teen and young adult phase.

>What did you do/what was your method?

To put it in simple words, its basically taking great writers work, and imitate their content. For example here's
from the book The scarlet pimpernel first paragraph, chapter 3:

>Feeling in every part of England certainly ran very high at this time against the French and their doings. Smugglers and legitimate traders between the French and the English coasts brought snatches of news from over the water, which made every honest Englishman's blood boil, and made him long to have “a good go” at those murderers, who had imprisoned their king and all his family, subjected the queen and the royal children to every species of indignity, and were even now loudly demanding the blood of the whole Bourbon family and of every one of its adherents.

Now rewrite this paragraph to your own liking randomly like this:

>In nearly every part of new york, the feeling of tiredness ran very high against the southerners and their army. Runaway slaves and legitimate human traffickers between the two high parts of texas bought news from over by carts and by doves, which increased the animosity of the northerners towards the slave owners and made the northerners blood boil, and some of them even wished to have "good go" at those war mongers, who had imprisoned even the little black children in dark slave rooms, subjected their parents and the northern soldiers who tried to save them with every known piece of indecency, and were even now demanding the blood of the whole confederate army and every one of its supporters.

Yeah, this doesn't make much sense if you read it too much, but as you can see, I imitated that paragraph with few things added and few things removed. This is how you learn to write effectively. The more you imitate the great writers, the more your own writing will improve.

>How did you use this for English?

The only way you could have mastery over writing is to seriously finish reading books like these and apply its concepts everyday until you get better:



This is a classic book on sentence writing and gives you tons of examples and explanations, although it can get quiet challenging to read it in first try.



This book is quite challenging read and at times very hard to comprehend, but read it one chapter at a time slowly.

Next, this book gives you a basic introduction to the field of rhetoric, which is something that writers in this sub don't usually talk very much, but its one of the biggest things you should focus on if you want to improve your writing to the advanced level from basic and intermediate level.

Finally, this book is the one you should definitely read, and this book is the one that basically inspired my initial comment.