Writing By Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing

In our modern society, we have forgotten the art of writing. When we write, we think to ourselves, the longer the sentence, the more intelligent I will sound. Many may say it is by writing long sentences. But is it all that true? In this piece of writing I would like to focus on an essay written by Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing. In this essay he explains how and why when we write, we should keep our sentences short. he also explains why students should be assigned essays that are not determinate on other sources as evidence. I will also be comparing this to a piece written by Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness. I will be comparing these two pieces on their writing style, and their essayistic ideas. My belief is that we need

But that is not all true. We have just engraved that in our minds, that short sentences induce an ‘elementary style of writing.’ We have learned to join two sentences together to make one great long sentence, and that would mean more of an intelligent style of writing. But that should not be true at all. Writers need to get that false statement out of their head. Writing short sentences will get the point across more clearly and efficiently. As stated in Several Short Sentences About Writing, “Why short sentences? They’ll sound strange for a while until you can hear what they’re capable of. But they carry you back to a prose you can control, to a stage in your education when your diction—your vocabulary—was under control too. Short sentences make it easier to examine the properties of the sentence. They help eliminate transitions. They make ambiguity less likely and easier to detect. There’s nothing wrong with well-made, strongly constructed, purposeful long sentences. But long sentences often tend to collapse or break down or become opaque or trip over with awkwardness. They’re pasted together with false syntax and rely on words like ‘with’ and ‘as’ to lengthen the sentence. They’re short on verbs, weak in

Claim, evidence, warrant. Students have been writing these essays for their whole school career, but have never been asked to write an essay that is freely written. I believe that as a student, we should be asked to write an essay based on nothing other than our thoughts because that is what sparks creativity and new ideas. As Klinkenborg said it in Several Short Sentences About Writing, “Do you remember feeling, when you were writing a paper for school, that your vocabulary was steadily shrinking? By the end, the same few words seeming to be buzzing around and around in your head, like flies weary of feeding. That’s a symptom of boredom. You were bored from the start and for a good reason. You were repeatedly asked to persuade or demonstrate or argue, to reiterate or prove or exemplify, to go through the motions of writing. You were almost never asked to notice or observe, witness or testify. You were being taught to manage the evidence gathered from other authorities instead of cultivating your own” (31). To put in short, as a student I have never been asked to write on my own and instead be dependent on other sources. An example of this from Ongoingness by Manguso would be this quote, “The essential problem of Ongoingness is that one must contemplate time as that very time, that very subject of one’s contemplation, disappears” (72). Manguso