ClearTips: Stunning sentences

The verb-free element

With parallel independent clauses, you can often drop the verb from the second, leaving the reader to insert it mentally, whether singular or plural.

Her novels registered these events most secretly, her letters not at all.

The flatter version of this might have been and her letters registered these events not at all. Dropping and and registered these events shortens the sentence and picks up the cadence.

Premises were cramped, working capital scarce, infrastructure fragile and the bureaucracy tiresome.

The trip is now a commodity; the tourist, a consumer; the world, a supermarket of travel opportunities trying mightily to satisfy every imaginable taste, temperament, and interest.

She supplied the facts and statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric, and, together, we have made arguments that stood unshaken through the storms of long years; arguments that no one has answered.

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