25 Great Sentences and How They Got That Way

For curious readers and aspiring writers, a guide to what makes a sentence sing.

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Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Neil Armstrong, Jack Kerouac, Yoda: these are just a handful of the writers and speakers whose words are parsed in this diverting romp through sentences culled from poems, essays, speeches, songs, fiction and film.

In chapters titled for distinctive features, such as “U-turn” and “impossibility”, master teacher Geraldine Woods deftly reveals the underlying craft that goes into the creation of a memorable sentence. Literature lovers will be delighted to discover new authors and revisit favourite passages from a fresh perspective. And writers who want to stretch their skills by following the prompts in each chapter may well find themselves feeling as Henry James did when he wrote, “I have many irons on the fire, and am bursting with writableness.”

25 Great Sentences and How They Got That Way is a must-read book for any resister of grammar-bound, sentence-diagramming analysis who wants to understand the art that lifts a sentence from good to great.