Writer-Workshops-Tip-1-Sentences

Hi. I'm Camilla Myers. I run the writing workshops within CSIRO. I am today going to give you a little example of the kind of thing that you might expect if you came on one of my writing workshops. So we're gonna start with just a short segment about writing sentences. So I thought I'd give you just a couple of points about sentences that I think are really, really important to think about when you're constructing them. The first is, what is the subject, the topic of the sentence that you're writing? That needs to be really, really clear at the start. So look at these two examples. "Bees pollinate flowers" and "flowers are pollinated by bees". So superficially, these sentences seem to say exactly the same thing. But look at them, they're actually not the same at all. The first one is about bees. The second is about flowers. They're really not the same. So one you might expect to find, the top one you might expect to find in a paragraph that describes the sort of things that bees might do. So a zoologist might have written that, writing about bees. In the second case, it's about the flowers, and the fact that they are pollinated by bees, so you're likely to find this in a paragraph about flowers. So, you can see here that by being really careful about the first word of your sentence, you can really drive the way your readers actually think about that sentence. The second thing that I want to mention to you that I think is really important about sentences is that verb. So, what the bees are doing or what the flowers are having done to them in these two cases. So, let's really think about that verb. What is the action? You can think about the verb actually carries what's happening in the sentence. It carries the action of the sentence, and makes your sentence strong. So let's look at this sentence. "The pollination of flowers is carried out by bees". You can see that's a really convoluted, weird kind of sentence. And it's because you can't really see what's happening with the flowers because it's not described well by the verb. So let's look at the verb, is carried out, is carried, is carried out by. Not clear at all. You can see that the verb "to pollinate" has been turned into a noun. And so, we've got "the pollination of flowers is carried out by bees". Not clear at all. What you want to say is "flowers are pollinated by bees", or as I said earlier, if you want the sentence to be about bees, then you need to say "Bees pollinate flowers". So that was just a small example of the sorts of things you might learn in one of my workshops. So please visit our website, and if you'd like to book into a workshop, look for the contact details, and please do contact me to talk more about what I might be able to offer.