Download The Sentence - Seattle Central College

The Sentence
The Sentence is the only naturally ocurring organic form of writing. Everything in
existence represents a sentence.
Look around you – what do you see? Things, in other words NOUNS.
What do you notice about them? Colors – shapes – sizes – textures – smells, in other
words ADJECTIVES.
What else do you notice? They are moving? Doing something? Interacting? Maybe
even a couple of these at once? In other words VERBS.
Finally the rate at which these actions take place? or the direction? ADVERBS
Add to this the fact that every language has a word for all these things –
VOCABULARY - AND a method for stringing those words together – GRAMMAR –
and you end up with a sentence.
So, a Sentence is simply all these things you notice, put together
grammatically, so that someone else can see that thing, as if they were here.
WARNING If you do not select the correct word, your reader will not be LOOKING
AT the thing as it actually occurs. And / or if you do not employ the correct
grammar, your reader will not SEE/UNDERSTAND what you are trying to say about
this thing.
WORKING PREMISE
The ineffectiveness of your writing, your communication, does not stem from a
small vocabulary or an ignorance of grammar – though these can certainly slow you
down. The working premise of this class is that your writing is not effective because
you do do see the thing for what it is. Consequently your choice of vocabulary is
blunted and you do not know now to string the words together you do chose. There
are real reasons for this blindness, most of which take hard work to overcome.
We will be working intently on sentences for the first several weeks. And the later
essays of course will depend upon them. So to speed the process along, you will be
writing sentences according to this template.
TERMS AS TRUTH
Every thing you notice either applies to the NOUN or to the VERB. When the Noun
and the Verb are aligned so Grammar is correct, the Noun is called the SUBJECT and
the Verb is called a PREDICATE.
So, the SENTENCE TEMPLATE becomes
Article – Single word Adjectives – SUBJECT – Adjective Phrases –
Single word Adverbs - PREDICATE Adverbial Phrases
Example: The - small brown – FOX - with the white tipped tail
quickly – JUMPS - over the fence.