This is a Great Courses video series on crafting sentences. It walks its audience through different sentence types and goes into the rhythm of a sentence, discussing the value of longer and shorter sentences and why. There are a lot of examples, it wanders into ideas from antiquity and touches on the bad ideas and why they are bad.
Overall, it provides a wealth of information and will enhance the audience appreciation of a well-written sentence.
In this book, Jesse provides clear steps and ideas to build structure and characters into a story. The book is well-written with clear goals and organization. She goes through different stages of writing discussing topics such as point of view, opening statements, building characters. She also compares the complexities and requirements of a book, short story and novella among others.
I found it easy to read and informative. She touches on ideas other books haven’t covered without going into great details.
This lecture series provides a guide for writing critiques. It is one of the Great Courses lectures series presented by Prof. Dorsey Armstrong of Purdue University.
The lectures focus primarily on organizing your thoughts and getting them on paper in a well-structured and readable form. She also encourages reading in as broad a spectrum as you can manage. Then a lesser emphasis on analysis, which, for me, felt like it came more from making your own thoughts clear and concise, then getting them in written form.
She speaks clearly and is well-organized. This makes it easy for her to get her points across. Her thoughts are reflected in the accompanying booklet. Although I felt it was too close, as it is often verbatim. Having read the book first, I felt like large portions of the lecture were redundant.
The material does a good job of covering the subject, and it felt adequately in-depth. In 24 lectures, each just shy of a half-hour, she covers a lot of ground. Although most of the lectures either discuss the subject matter abstractly, she does draw good examples from several works including fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction. One lecture is devoted to grammar, which I felt was more of a sore point for her and, for me, felt like it should have been outside the scope of this lecture series.
I felt the lectures were good and well worth the time. I listed to several of them multiple times.
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