My latest crits from fellow writers focused a lot on my sentences. specifically my need to ‘tighten them up’ and the fact that in places they are ‘unfinished’. So i sat, once again, reading aloud to myself and trying to spot the problem areas. With the movie version playing in my head i found this just frustrating – of course it all made sense to me. 

Plan B, when hubby gets over his food poisoning from last nights chinese i’m going to ask him to read a few pages out loud to me. If he stumbles then the sentences obviously don’t flow logically for him.

But in the mean time i’ve grabbed a few of my fav authors and opened their works to any random page, reading any random sentence and breaking it down into pace and point, verb, noun, adjective etc. To see where i’m standing in relation to those i admire.

Google books is also a great point of call with:

First we read, then we write: Emerson on the creative process

 By Robert D. Richardson

Being one of my fave easy searchers. Page 53 being a good starting point.

But here i am back at the beginning. With too many options and not enough straight answers. I wish i could see my own floors as clearly as others can.

Gotta love modern technology and the online university era. Charles Sturt Universities take on sentences can be found here: 

http://www.csu.edu.au/division/studserv/my-studies/ess/sentence

from their website:

A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought.

It has to have a subject (noun or pronoun). This is usually the person, thing or concept that does the action in the sentence and is called the actor. It tells who or what the sentence is about.

It has to have a predicate (verb or verb phrase). This is usually the action that the actor does. It describes what the subject is or is doing.

And more, it gets very complicated even though we hope most of the time most of this just comes naturally. But when we seem to be forgetting the fundamentals tracking down the problem feels both mammoth and exhausting.

So here goes. From paragraph one of the new wish-to-be masterpiece:

‘Concentrating was hard enough on its own.’

I can see that there is no subject. There is a predicate, concentrating. ‘However, if you combine them with an independent clause, everybody is happy again, and you get a complex sentence.’ (from csu)

So… ‘For me concentrating was hard enough on its own.’ or ‘I had been finding concentrating hard enough without the added distraction.’