Study English Grammar

It is useful to think of the first sentence of a paragraph as the ‘topic’ sentence. In our revised version of the letter, the topic sentence is: David was not able to attend school yesterday. It is effective as an opening because it is such a controlled, almost declamatory, statement. Most essays can start in a similar way: you can create an initial dramatic and arresting effect by having a simple sentence that stands alone, not tangled up in subordinate clauses and details. Look, for example, at these opening sentences from students’ essays:

Modern poetry is disturbing and problematic.

Modem poetry, by which we mean poetry produced roughly between 1910 and 1930, falls into various categories, of which the most original is probably that referred to as ‘modernist’, in particular T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.

There is nothing actually wrong with the second example here, but it does not create any great expectation that we are going to encounter an interesting essay. Rather, it is going to be an essay loaded with facts, crowded in at every comma. The first example, by contrast, is simpler, but in saying less says more, perhaps principally because the student has thought quite carefully about the construction and impact of this topic sentence.

The student who wrote that sentence has grasped an important point: you are always writing for an audience. There is something terribly dull about an essay that starts, in this essay I will consider… And even less appealing is an essay that a start, The Oxford English Dictionary defines…What you want is a topic sentence that gains the reader’s attention: it can do this, however, by simply stating the issue, and then stopping before it out-stays its welcome. The sentences that follow in the paragraph must then develop the topic. And, as your treatment of the issue gradually becomes more elaborate and expansive, the second and subsequent sentences need to become more complicated in structure, but only to the extent of introducing additional main clauses and subordinate clauses within the recognized rules of sentence composition. The point, therefore, is that your ideas cannot just be rolled out casually and conversationally. They need to be framed in sentences that obey the rules, with careful use of punctuation (that is, in particular, commas) to signal to the reader the separate units of the sentences (and so the separate units of sense). If you stick to this logic, you then have the freedom to start paying real attention to your choice of vocabulary, which will often involve sifting through various possibilities of the words that can be used. It is all a slightly more self-conscious process than you might be used to, but it is not inherently difficult; the start of a new clause, for example, is roughly equivalent to a change of gear when driving rather than a sudden change of direction.

write a grammatical sentence, punctuate it correctly, and make sure the individual words are working as they should. The middle section of this book is all about how to produce more confident work, but your writing can only get better if you get the basics right, if you know how to produce the right words in the right order. The way in which we want to illustrate this is by looking at a student’s essay I hat makes the most common mistakes in a very obvious way. We discuss first paragraph of this essay in detail, but, when it comes down to it, only one point is significant: the student is thinking out loud. The essay is a string of thoughts rather than a written performance. In the form in which the audient submitted it, this could, in fact, be presented very effectively as a spoken paper in class. But it does not quite work as writing. Yet, the most minor surgery can quickly transform the essay into a good piece of written Work. Indeed, this is the essence of what we are trying to say here: that, if you follow a handful of basic rules about sentence construction and punctuation, you can, within minutes, turn even a piece of work that is groaningly awful into a polished performance. And this is always the case. The problems in students’ writing are always the same problems. The answer is always the same answer: that is, ‘pay attention to the basic rules’.