Look Around You What Do You See? Things, in Other Words NOUNS

The Sentence

The Sentence is the only naturally ocurring organic form of writing. Everything in existence represents a sentence.

Look around you – what do you see? Things, in other words NOUNS.

What do you notice about them? Colors – shapes – sizes – textures – smells, in other words ADJECTIVES.

What else do you notice? They are moving? Doing something? Interacting? Maybe even a couple of these at once? In other words VERBS.

Finally the rate at which these actions take place? or the direction?ADVERBS

Add to this the fact that every language has a word for all these things – VOCABULARY - AND a method for stringing those words together – GRAMMAR – and you end up with a sentence.

So, a Sentence is simply all these things you notice, put together grammatically, so that someone else can see that thing, as if they were here.

WARNING If you do not select the correct word, your reader will not be LOOKING AT the thing as it actually occurs. And / or if you do not employ the correct grammar, your reader will not SEE/UNDERSTAND what you are trying to say about this thing.

WORKING PREMISE

The ineffectiveness of your writing, your communication, does not stem from a small vocabulary or an ignorance of grammar – though these can certainly slow you down. The working premise of this class is that your writing is not effective because you do do see the thing for what it is. Consequently your choice of vocabulary is blunted and you do not know now to string the words together you do chose. There are real reasons for this blindness, most of which take hard work to overcome.

We will be working intently on sentences for the first several weeks. And the later essays of course will depend upon them. So to speed the process along, you will be writing sentences according to this template.

TERMS AS TRUTH

Every thing you notice either applies to the NOUN or to the VERB. When the Noun and the Verb are aligned so Grammar is correct, the Noun is called the SUBJECT and the Verb is called a PREDICATE.

So, the SENTENCE TEMPLATE becomes

Article – Single word Adjectives – SUBJECT – Adjective Phrases –

Single word Adverbs - PREDICATE Adverbial Phrases

Example: The - small brown – FOX - with the white tipped tail

quickly – JUMPS - over the fence.