Writing a Sentence

Abstract

This is the chapter you are most likely to skip. The fact that you have bought or borrowed this book shows that you want to improve your writing skills, but the likelihood is that you are looking for advice on how to fine-tune your performance or perhaps for a ‘quick-fix’ solution to a problem. The chances are that you do not want to waste your time reading about something as elementary as ‘a sentence’. Our experience as teachers in a university, however, where students might be expected to be competent writers, has shown us that the most common weakness in students’ writing is the inability to generate sentences that are not only readable and understandable but also grammatically correct in a conventional, formal sense. This is not a new problem; people have always had difficulties handling the basic mechanics of sentences. Part of the reason for this may lie in the sort of technical vocabulary sometimes used to explain the mechanics of language which can be off-putting, although the number of technical terms you actually need to know is very small. The good news, however, is that once the basics of sentence construction are grasped, everything else will fall into place. This is because the sentence is the basis of essay-writing. Indeed, the main thing students need to know is how to construct grammatical sentences. Fortunately, this is a skill that is easy to acquire. Please, therefore, do not skip this chapter. On the contrary, if you are only going to read one chapter of this book, make sure it is this one.