Class #5: Sentence Types and Setting• Agenda:

• Sentence combination

• Cisneros,“Woman Hollering Creek”• Fictional dream

• Conflict

• Setting

• Story #1 assignment: questions

• For Thursday:• Finish setting exercise

• Quiz: Past verb tenses, punctuating dialogue, sentence combination and types, vocabulary bank, literary terminology

• Roth, pp. 809-814 (top)

21G.240 “Imagining English” (Grunwald) MIT, Spring 2021

Choppiness and sentence combination• Choppiness = too many short sentences in a row

• Vary sentence length & combine: coordination, subordination, adjective, clauses & phrases, participial phrases, appositives

• Sometimes a short sentence is good: adds punch and emphasis:

I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway. As a matter of fact, she did stand frequently in various doorways looking at me. She stood one day, just so, at the front door, the darkness of the hallway behind her. It was New Year's Day. She said sadly, If you come home at 4 A.M. when you're seventeen, what time will you come home when you're twenty? She asked this question without humor or meanness. She had begun her worried preparations for death. She would not be present, she thought, when I was twenty. So she wondered. (—from Paley, “Mother”)

21G.240 “Imagining English” (Grunwald) MIT, Spring 2021

Practice

• Go to Google docs and

1. Compare your solutions to the Roth paragraph

2. Discuss the sentences from your work that I’ve posted there. Which are ungrammatical (not correct sentences), and how would you correct them?

MIT, Spring 202121G.240 “Imagining English” (Grunwald)

Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek”

• To holler:

• What roles does the setting play in this story?

MIT, Spring 202121G.240 “Imagining English” (Grunwald)

Setting• Sets the mood

• Don’t need every detail, but a few “telling” ones

• Good fiction is like a waking dream (Gardner) in which the reader can suspend their disbelief and be in this fictional place.• Must be clear and vivid

• Mainly nouns and verbs: Relatively few adjectives and adverbs

• Must relate to the plot and characters. Ask yourself, How much would it matter if Ichanged the setting of my story?• If the answer is not a lot, you may need to change the setting or make better use of the

current one

MIT, Spring 202121G.240 “Imagining English” (Grunwald)

Setting exercise

• Get out your writing journal and a pencil and do the following:

Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war, or death.

Look up any words to need to. Of course, you may need to use a dictionary that goes from your native language to English. At this point, choose whatever synonym seems most appropriate.

The goal is to write a passage that does not address its main subject directly, head on. In some ways, the exercise is the ultimate statement about the purpose of craft. In first drafts, we attempt to figure out what we want to write (a man’s son died in the war), but in revision, we find the best way to write it (by describing a barn, with no reference to anything on the man’s mind).

MIT, Spring 202121G.240 “Imagining English” (Grunwald)