Five experiments to diversify stale sentences, from the book “25 Great Sentences and How They Got That Way,” with examples.
1. Condense. 🔗
Distill your idea to its essence. 🔗
Eliminate everything unnecessary.
Make your point. Emphatically.
2. Expand. 🔗
Add description for a more detailed picture. 🔗
Invite your readers—
those lovers of rhythm and words,
those lovers of metaphor and imagery,
those lovers of taking the road less traveled,
your lovers—on a strol.
To teleport your reader somewhere new, you need detail.
3. Repeat. 🔗
Use parallelism to emphasize or surprise. 🔗
Repetition can provide better context.
Repetition can draw the reader in.
Repetition can emphasize a point.
Repetition in large quantities can also induce sleep.
Create a pattern, then break it to surprise your reader.
4. Contradict. 🔗
Tell them how it isn’t, then tell them how it is. 🔗
The goal shouldn’t be learning to write, it should be writing to learn.
This framework will help you challenge conventional thought.
5. Focus on Absence. 🔗
It can be useful to focus on nothingness, instead of not focusing on anything. 🔗
There’s a subtle difference:
“Infrequent writers will gain no subscribers.”
“Infrequent writers will not gain subscribers.”
Never experimenting will get you nowhere.