ClearTips: Stunning sentences

Leading parts

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. . . .

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