Artful Sentences

By Virginia Tufte,

Book cover of Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style

Book description

In Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style,Virginia Tufte shows how standard sentence patterns and forms contribute to meaning and art in more than a thousand wonderful sentences from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  The book has special interest for aspiring writers, students of literature and language, and anyone who finds joy…


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Why read it?

1 author picked Artful Sentences as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

My debt to this book is huge, and my gratitude to Professor Tufte is boundless. From this book, I learned much of what I now know about the possibilities of the English sentence. Appositives, nominative absolutes, left- and right-branching sentences, inversions: These techniques and many more became a regular part of my writing practice. I delighted in exploring them and seeing what they could do for my writing.

Eventually, I became familiar enough with them to be able to pass them on–through practices I invented and taught my students. Undergrads, graduate students, working adults, aspiring creative writers: they all benefited.…

From Barbara's list on achieving writing excellence.

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