Sentence Modeling

Better Writing Through Imitation

One way to get better at using complex sentence structures is to take cool sentences that exist in the real world, take them apart, and then write a new sentence using the same structure. 

Let me show you. 

Let's say you had a short sentence that you liked; for example, this one:

“The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”

– Roberto Bolano

We can take this apart and see it's:

The [noun], at [noun], looked like a [adj] + [noun].

Then, if we want to rewrite it with a Halloween theme we'd get:

The ghost, at midnight, looked like a rancid marshmallow.

You can choose which words to keep and which ones to change, keeping the same grammatical form.

 

Let's try a longer one. 

 “I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn’s rings.”

– Karen Russell

 

Which gets us:

I came to [verb] the [plural noun], with their [adj] and [adj] [plural noun] and their [adj] [noun] and their [adj], [adj], [adj] [plural noun] with [plural noun] the [noun] or [proper noun possessive] [plural noun].

Until finally:

I came to love the nights, with their romantic and mysterious breezes and their twinkling stars and their fat, glowing benevolent moons with beams the length of Seattle's sound.

 

If it helps, think of it like a MadLibs that you create yourself. If it helps, here's a partial list of parts of speech if you've forgotten:

• nouns (or plural nouns)
• verbs
• adjectives (describe nouns)
• adverbs (describe verbs--or other adverbs)
• pronouns (he, her, it, them, etc.)
• prepositions (in, on, through, etc.)
• conjunctions (and, or, but...however, consequently, etc.)
• interjections (Whoa! Stop!)