BEAUTIFUL SENTENCE ACTIVITY
Directions: Your task may seem simple, but be careful it is tougher than it sounds. Your job today is to write ONE beautiful, articulate, intelligent, concise sentence that conveys an important message. Revise FIVE times for each of the following. Manipulate these things to make the sentence sound more powerful, interesting, and intelligent.
1. Structure-complex, compound, simple?
2. Word choices-diction (academic sounding?) and vocabulary
3. Tone-Authority, emotion?
4. Figurative language-You need to use it cautiously and without ANY cliché.
5. Originality of thought and sentiment (emotion)
Write your sentence at the bottom of this page. Here are some examples of beautiful sentences to get you thinking. The question you must answer in one sentence is: Who are you? (Not your name, but what defines you as a person!)
“Kiss me and you will see how important I am.”
Sylvia Plath
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer
“I am, indeed, a king, because I know how to rule myself.”
Pietro Aretino
“A sudden warm rainstorm washes down in sweet hyphens.”
J.M. Ledger
“Men are like armored things, mountainous assemblages of armor and leather, masonry even, which you are told will self-dismantle if you touch the right spot, and out will flow passionate attention.”
Norman Rush
“His blood changed to falling snow”
Bernard Malamud
“We are souls shut inside a cage of bones; souls squeezed into a parcel of flesh.”
Michel Faber
“Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
Jonathan Safran Foer
Name: ______
Original Sentence: ______
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Revise the structure (complex, compound, simple?)
______
Revise the word choices
______
Revise the tone (make it more aggressive or intense)
______
Add figurative language…(metaphor, hyperbole, simile, etc.)
______
Add more emotion words…
______
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