It may seem strange, perhaps even uninspired, for writers to look up opening sentences in a book of listings. But Romesburg’s book, “What do you think, writer?” provides a lot of inspiration when creating openings, closings, titles and transitions in your writing.
An unusual guide for writers
This unusual guide lists thousands of suggestions for adapting previously published sentences into exactly what you need for essays, articles, sermons, opinion pieces, thematic articles, reports, and dissertations. (The opening sentence of this review is an example of this technical adaptation, taken from their sample sentence “It may seem strange, perhaps even unwarranted, to talk about light pollution and social well-being at the same time”).
The book also offers 18 ways to open an essay and a dozen assorted writing tips, such as “How to decide whether or not to use a comma after an introductory phrase in a sentence,” “Don’t be afraid to put short details in parentheses. “and” How to cite an anecdote or a fact when you cannot identify its origin. “
The structure of a good sentence
The strength of this work, however, is clearly the author’s painstaking research on the structure of a good sentence. Its alphabetical listings are made up of sentences taken from essays that appear in “The Atlantic Monthly,” “Harper’s Monthly Magazine,” “The Literary Digest,” and other respected publications from the 1800s and 1900s.
Although the material is presented to all types of writers at all levels of experience as “their first point of reference to get out of mental blocks”, it should be very useful for college students and new writers looking for help to start writing projects. . A university professor of forestry who often cites his own environmental writings as examples in this book, Romesburg is donating the proceeds from sales to no-kill animal shelters.
Book: “What do you think, writer?”
Author: H. Charles Romesburg
Lulu Press, Morrisville, North Carolina
ISBN: 1411628624, $ 22.95, 2005, 190 pages.