Here’s our challenge for you this week. In your reading, whether it be A Court of Thorns and Roses, War & Peace, or the autobiography of Gandhi, pick one sentence that stands out to you. You don’t even need a reason why it stands out, just that it does. Write it down with a pen and paper. 

Now, scrape up all of your grammar knowledge and try to identify the parts of this sentence. If you can’t remember all of the terms, just find the subject and the verb. The doer of the action and the action itself. 

For example, I chose this sentence from Inheritance by John Drinkwater: “My classes were dull, my masters with a few exceptions were dull, the school-life in general, apart from the sports, was dull.” I liked this sentence a lot because it felt repetitive, but impactful in its repetition. The subject of the first clause, the doer of the action, is “my classes”. The verb is “were”, with “dull” being the subject complement. It’s okay if you haven’t heard that term in awhile, because that’s not the point of this. 

Now that you’ve picked the sentence, written it down, and parsed it out a bit, try to imitate it with new subject matter. Replace the nouns with another noun you’ve been wanting to write about, the verbs with other verbs, etc. 

Here’s my imitation of Drinkwater’s sentence: “The cat was tired, the blanket sagging beneath her form was tired, the room around her, apart from the slight light whispering through the windows, was tired.” 

I have never thought to write a sentence structured like that, but I really like it. Finding sentences that you like and parsing them out enough to imitate them can spark new ideas for sentence structures in your writing. It can give you a fresh perspective on an idea you’ve been mulling over. 

If you liked this exercise, keep doing it! Start paying attention to why certain sentences stick out to you. Try imitating them! The more you read, the more different ways of writing will open up to you and feel more accessible.

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