Watch these three videos carefully. They demonstrate the last three steps for creating sentences that are works of art.
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So our composition is coming along, and our predicate is looking nice and detailed. But we're still stuck with a somewhat boring subject-- the birds. I think we can do better. So with step 4 it's time to paint our subject. And that means answering these questions-- which birds? What kind? And how many? So to do this, we're going to use our imagination a little bit. First, for which birds, well, clearly it's these birds here. We don't know a whole lot about them. But this is where we can kind of make a story to make our sentence a lot more interesting. So back here we see some clouds. So it's not too hard to imagine that these birds recently flew out of those clouds. Maybe they came out of those clouds. Now we don't know this for sure. It's a picture. They might have flown out of a landfill a second ago. But we're going to pretend, for the sake of the masterpiece sentence, that they flew out of the clouds. Or another word for "flew out of is "emerged." So which birds? The birds that emerged from the clouds. And our next question, what kind of birds? Well it's hard to see what kind they are. They're in front of the sun, and they're in the shadows. So we don't know what color they are or anything. But thankfully English has a word for everything. And if you can only see the outline of something, the word for that is silhouetted. Very nice word. I think we brought it from the French. So what kind of birds? We're going to call these "silhouetted birds." And finally, how many? Well that's an easy question. There are two. So which birds? The ones the emerged from the clouds. What kind of birds are they? They're silhouetted. And how many of them are there? There are two. And we put it all together, and we get our new sentence, "At sunset, with wings outstretched, two silhouetted birds emerge from the clouds and fly over the waves." Now we're getting a lot closer to putting this picture in the mind of our reader. Let's move on to step 5. Transcript
Take a close look at all the words in your sentence. Are there any that are unclear or confusing? Can you be more specific or original with your nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives?
Step five is to paint your words. And we've got some pretty good words going on here, but we can always improve it. There's so many combinations of words out there and so many ways to express yourself that if you really think about it and you really tinker with these words, you can get really close to exactly the idea that you're trying to express. And I think the secret to being a good writer is to think very hard about almost every single word you use and make sure it's exactly the right tone, and connotation, and feeling that you're going for. And a good way to start improving the words in a sentence is to look at the verbs. The verbs are the engine of a sentence, and a sentence doesn't really go anywhere without them. Our two verbs in this sentence are emerge and fly. Emerge is a pretty nice verb. Fly is kind of ordinary. So what we could do is break out our thesaurus. And here's a list of synonyms for the word fly that I found. And the secret to using a thesaurus is you don't want to use words that you've never heard before or that you don't really know what they mean. So maybe you pull up the thesaurus and you type in fly, and it says evanesce. And you think, oh, that sounds kind of smart. Maybe I'll try that word. But you're not really sure what it means. It's an easy way to make mistakes, and you actually don't get the idea that you're going for. So when you use the thesaurus, try to stick to words that you know. Maybe the thesaurus will remind you of a word that you forgot about. Some of these words are somewhat useful. Here we go. Glide is a nice one. Sail-- the birds sail over the sea. That sounds nice. They whisk over the sea. They advance over the sea. Ooh, how about soar? They soar over the waves. That sounds pretty good. So you can use a thesaurus to figure out what word you want to improve. And sometimes you look at all the synonyms, and you like the one you started with. So let's see what other words we can maybe work on here. We have waves. That sounds pretty ordinary. Over, birds-- still kind of ordinary sounding. Can we say anything more about these birds? I mean, they are silhouetted, and so it's hard to see them. But I think if we look close, we can maybe see what kind of birds they are. Those look like sea gulls to me. So I think we can be more specific than just saying birds, and we can call them sea gulls. And maybe we could do better than waves. So let's see if we can do a mind map. Maybe you've done one of these before. So what you would do is you would put the word here in the middle, and you would draw a circle around it. And then all the synonyms you could think of you would attach as spokes. So what are some synonyms to waves? Maybe we could say the sea, the ocean, the shore, the coast, the tide. All right. So then we have some synonyms here. You might be able to think of some more. And what you do is you would take your time and swap some of these words in and out and just see where the music comes from, see what really, really gets the sentence going and making it sound beautiful. So after we go through this process and we replace some of the words, we can bring out our new sentence here, which says, "at sunset, with wings outstretched, a pair of silhouetted sea gulls emerge from the clouds and soar above the rolling tide." Now, that's starting to sound pretty nice. So let's finish this up in step six. Transcript
Well, we've come a long way from the birds fly, and I think this sentence does a much better job of putting an image in the reader's mind. At sunset with wings outstretched, a pair-- I can edit that out. So let's take one last look at this sentence and make sure everything is perfect, perfect, perfect. And we take a closer look at this sentence. I think seagulls is actually one word and not two, but everything else looks pretty close. I don't see any misspelled words, and all the commas seem to be where they need to be. The punctuation seems right. So I think once we fix this little mistake here, we are ready to frame this picture and call it done. At sunset with wings outstretched, a pair of silhouetted seagulls emerge from the clouds and soar above the rolling tide. And that is our masterpiece sentence. Transcript
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