Next Sentence
a
The Name of the Game
No matter how true, how heart-wrenching, or how insightful what you have to say is, it’s all lost if no one reads it. You must find some way of dragging your reader's eyes forward, word by word, sentence by sentence . . . I won’t say the next X-by-X because you already see that coming, and why would you read further? So, poof! I lose you (if I haven’t already). To keep you, I have to give you something that will make you want to read the next sentence. What could that be? Something you didn't know? Something a little amusing? Something a bit unexpected? A bright word? A vivid image? A syntactical stunt? A puff of wisdom? Something. Anything. Just please read the next sentence. It’s a harsh truth, but in the end that's the name of the game: shooing you reader on from sentence to sentence. This is the root and ruthless challenge to all writers.
Helping you win this game is the mission of this website. You win whenever you can move your reader's eye on from one sentence you write to the next one. That should be obvious, but it is probably the case that most people don't really write with that goal in mind. They imagine that once they get an idea down on a page or up on a screen some kindly person will come along and be very happy to read it. Turns out this is a highly unlikely.
Readers are a sly bunch. No one is watching them, so they can simply stop reading the moment they get bored. The same person who will listen to you patiently, nodding and smiling, in a face-to-face conversation, would drop you like a hot penny if you gave him the exact same material on paper -- unless, of course, you are in school, and there you have an English teacher who is paid to read what you produce, which may explain why people, in later life, imagine that what they write will be read. Sadly, (and, trust me, I know) the odds of that happening are typically slim, and close to zero if the writing is bad. Reading bad writing is like eating rotten meat. If you can avoid it, you avoid it.
So, in general, English class is not the best place to learn how to win the writing game. It can help, but it can also do serious damage. And, of course, when your education is over, and no one is being paid even to pretend to read what you write, you had better have a plan. NextSentence.net will try to help. There are many tricks to learn. You probably know some already. We will visit those familiar rhetorical ploys, and explore others that are visited less often.
The Name of the Game
No matter how true, how heart-wrenching, or how insightful what you have to say is, it’s all lost if no one reads it. You must find some way of dragging your reader's eyes forward, word by word, sentence by sentence . . . I won’t say the next X-by-X because you already see that coming, and why would you read further? So, poof! I lose you (if I haven’t already). To keep you, I have to give you something that will make you want to read the next sentence. What could that be? Something you didn't know? Something a little amusing? Something a bit unexpected? A bright word? A vivid image? A syntactical stunt? A puff of wisdom? Something. Anything. Just please read the next sentence. It’s a harsh truth, but in the end that's the name of the game: shooing you reader on from sentence to sentence. This is the root and ruthless challenge to all writers.
Helping you win this game is the mission of this website. You win whenever you can move your reader's eye on from one sentence you write to the next one. That should be obvious, but it is probably the case that most people don't really write with that goal in mind. They imagine that once they get an idea down on a page or up on a screen some kindly person will come along and be very happy to read it. Turns out this is a highly unlikely.
Readers are a sly bunch. No one is watching them, so they can simply stop reading the moment they get bored. The same person who will listen to you patiently, nodding and smiling, in a face-to-face conversation, would drop you like a hot penny if you gave him the exact same material on paper -- unless, of course, you are in school, and there you have an English teacher who is paid to read what you produce, which may explain why people, in later life, imagine that what they write will be read. Sadly, (and, trust me, I know) the odds of that happening are typically slim, and close to zero if the writing is bad. Reading bad writing is like eating rotten meat. If you can avoid it, you avoid it.
So, in general, English class is not the best place to learn how to win the writing game. It can help, but it can also do serious damage. And, of course, when your education is over, and no one is being paid even to pretend to read what you write, you had better have a plan. NextSentence.net will try to help. There are many tricks to learn. You probably know some already. We will visit those familiar rhetorical ploys, and explore others that are visited less often.