Writing Rules! Advice From The Times on Writing Well - NYTimes.com

In Writing Rules! Advice From The Times on Writing Well, my favorites are rules five and nine. Here are a few excerpts from those two rules, and from one of the cross-linked readings.

Rule five, Study Sentences, comprises two related suggestions:

Look for examples of interesting sentence structure and sentence variety in a work you are studying or reading, then write your own "copy-change” versions, in which you borrow another author’s structure and use it to create your own piece. 

You might also consider excerpts from children’s book[-s] to review sound literary devices and explore the music that sentences make.

(Rule 5: Study Sentences, ¶¶4-5, italics added)

A Pomegranate Words page illustrates the "copy-change" process with poetry, if you follow the first link in the passage above. Yet the process of imitating sentence structure–not copying content–applies equally to prose, as does the advice on that page to give credit to your sources:

If there's no trace of the source, you don't need to give anyone else credit. If, on the other hand, evidence of the original structure remains, you should give a nod to the first writer in some way.

(Pomegranate Words, 2008, Poetry: Copy Change (Imitation), ¶2).

Rule nine, Fail, again from the Times, may sound a bit too adventurous–until you read the explanations. Though the subject heading, "Fail," is an attention grabber, the point is to learn from your mistakes by collecting and reflecting on your written work:

Value mistakes, and the successes that grow from them, by keeping a portfolio of your work, including revisions and editing exercises. You might even reflect in writing on how your writing has progressed....

(Rule 9: Fail, ¶2, italics added)

The suggestions that I've highlighted above should seem quite familiar to you by now. If they don't, please ask about them either in class, or in comments on this post.

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