To fix: “Walking down the beach, Theo got a sunburn on his shoulders.”Ĭasagrande is a journalist and, though she does also cover fiction, she is more focused on clarity than art.
Here’s a dangler for you: “Walking down the beach, Theo’s shoulders got sunburned.” It wasn’t Theo’s shoulders walking down the beach – it was Theo or his feet.
Consider this change: “After twenty-five years as an accountant, Mike robbed a bank.” Once you understand this principle, you can use the subordination lever to bring down the house lights and spotlight your main point.Ĭasagrande treats relative clauses, prepositional phrases, and participial phrases in a similar way, showing you how to use them to add detail to sentences while avoiding the dreaded danglers and misplaced modifiers. Consider this example: “Before robbing a bank, Mike was an accountant.” Tacking on the subordinating conjunction before diminishes the power of the bank robbery, giving Mike’s status as an accountant the grammatical starring role in the sentence. You will always know the why before she explains the how.įor example, she kicks off the book by demonstrating how to use subordination to highlight the main point of your sentence. Like learning about dovetail joints in the course of making a table, you will learn about relative clauses in the course of creating strong sentences. This is a book of short sentences, sharp angles, and clear advice.Ĭasagrande’s aim is to make you a better writer, not to teach you grammar – the grammar instruction is just something that happens along the way. This week’s book – June Casagrande’s It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences: A Writer's Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences – is the opposite of aimless and daydreamy. These waning days of summer are perfect for the kind of aimless reading and daydreaming that lead to flashes of inspiration way down the road when you’ve forgotten to expect them. I tried to use KM Weiland’s outlining formula but realized that I don’t yet know enough about my characters and setting to productively answer those why questions, so I’m going to do some more thinking and gathering before trying again. How did the writing go this week? Just as I had hoped, I sat down amongst the redwoods last weekend to spin out ideas for my novel.
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