Most writers merrily run from one independent
clause to the next, either joining them in one sentence or letting them
stand apart as two. Doing this, they miss the opportunity to link two
ideas more closely and build a more compelling structure—one with
a touch of suspense. Most leading parts could appear after the subject—less
suspenseful, less emphatic.
Esteemed in the West as the statesman who ended
the cold war, Mr. Gorbachev is extremely unpopular in Russia,
where he is blamed for allowing the Soviet Union to fall apart and
for not having pushed reform of the command economy far enough.
Shortening what would otherwise have been an
independent clause (Mr. Gorbachev is esteemed…) and
abruptly attaching the phrase to the front of a sentence is a
standard edit that too few writers avail themselves of.
Struck by an annual outbreak of filial sentiment,
Americans make more long-distance calls on Mother's Day than on
any other day of the year.
Neither quite this nor altogether that, terrifically
itself yet perpetually ambiguous, Turkey stands alone among
the nations.
Like many amateur memoirs, this book
may be best appreciated by the writer, not the reader.
A special class of the common embellishment,
with a prepositional phrase, this one is attached to the subject
that immediately follows. The example here could have been the
common This book is like many amateur memoirs and may best.
. . .
