Sense of Structure, The: Writing from the Reader's Perspective, 1st edition

Emphasizing “reader expectations,” this composition text provides an insightful guide to writing clearly and effectively.

Reflecting on the author's decades of experience as an international writing consultant, writer, and instructor, The Sense of Structure teaches writing from the perspective of readers. This text demonstrates that readers have relatively fixed expectations of where certain words or grammatical constructions will appear in a unit of discourse. By bringing these intuitive reading processes to conscious thought, this text provides students with tools for understanding how readers interact with the structure of writing, from punctuation marks to sentences to paragraphs, and how meaning and purpose are communicated through structure.

• Chapter 1, “Understanding the Complexity of the English Sentence from the Reader's Perspective,” prepares students to think like readers do by introducing them to the complexity of the reading/interpreting process.

• Chapter 2, “A Structural Anatomy of the English Sentence,” demonstrates that in an English sentence, WHERE a word appears may actually be more important than the word itself, giving students conscious control of the reading processes they know intuitively as readers.

• Chapter 4, “‘Whose Paragraph Is It, Anyway?’” The Shapes of the English Paragraph,” deals with reader expectations at the paragraph level and teaches students to write paragraphs as writers in the real world write them.

• Chapter 5, “Write the Way You Speak and Other Bad Pieces of Advice,” explains and discards more than a dozen threadbare “rules,” such as “Avoid the Passive,” “Write the Way You Speak,” and “Every Paragraph Should Start with a Topic Sentence.”

• Chapter 6, “Mark My Words: A Reader's Perspective on the World of Punctuation,” offers an entirely new approach to this subject with a history of punctuation that explains the origin of each mark.

• Chapter 3, “Weights and Balances; Motions and Connections,” helps students understand how controlling the structure of their sentences enables them to control how readers perceive the flow of thought in their writing.