We need to exercise the discipline as we advance into the rest of the paragraph. Our student, though, was not keeping to the rules, and so, as perhaps could be expected, the lack of control at the outset means that, by the third sentence, the writing begins more and more to fall apart as he wrestles with his ideas:
It was the first place of its kind, in America in this respect, also in the way he carefully detailed and drew up the system of government, to be implemented there, and proposal for future American colonies.
The student is trying to expand t... Read more...
There are only a few questions that you need to ask yourself. Have I written a sentence? Do I need a compound sentence? Do I need subordinate clauses? Have I produced all these elements in accordance with the rules? Does my sentence make sense and read well? Beyond the individual sentence, however, is the logic of a paragraph, where we need to be more Ware of how each sentence as a unit combines in a larger pattern. The ore we are in control of building an argument, the more we are going to be control of the argument in an essay. This might be more apparent if we look again at the paragraph we have been discussing as the student initially wrote it and then at the revised version:
Our message, it should be apparent, is simple: the way to move forward is to go back to basics. If you want to excel as a writer, there are no fancy or elaborate tricks that have to be learnt. You merely have to become more proficient in exercising the basic skills of sentence construction. In order to drive home the points about how sentences are composed, and how important it is to be in charge of the mechanics of sentence construction and the mechanics of punctuation, we are going to examine a single essay by a Student about the founding of the city of Philadelphia. At this point, you might be tempted to say that such a subject has nothing in common with the essays you have to write, but try to see that what we are discussing the whole time is how to solve problems in writing, and how solving them rates the opportunity to say more in an essay.