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Kerrigan's book is life-altering.
His fundamental insight is:
the sentence
A sentence is a paragraph is a chapter is a book.
Brilliant.
His book has altered my way of thinking about writing -- and it's making my book-writing better and easier. Thanks in part to Kerrigan's book I now have a thesis sentence; I can state a fairly complex thesis in a single, declarative sentence.
Before reading the first 20 pages of Kerrigan, I was coming to a thesis for Temple's & my new book; I had an implicit thesis.
Kerrigan's insights told me an implicit thesis wasn't enough.
I needed to be able to write one sentence that stated the thesis of our new book.
And I did!
Incredible.
Step 1.
Kerrigan's method has six steps, which he asks his students to memorize. Step 1 is:
Write a short, simple declarative sentence that makes one statement.
Writing to the Point Fourth Edition Table of Contents
Amazon review Kerrigan & home program
Writing to the Point, first installment
William J. Kerrigan and the sentence
writing and swimming: pp 1 & 2 Kerrigan
writing and swimming: pp 1 & 2 Kerrigan
To the Instructor
3 comments:
From what I can tell, this Kerrigan book seems excellent. I've come across it before but have never stopped to read it. That will probably change soon.
I really don't know how to express this without it sounding snarky, but the plain truth is that if scholars were forced to "Write a short, simple declarative sentence that makes one statement," about 99.3% of academic writing would never happen, let alone be published. It's a mantra that I'll probably reference a billion times and do my best to stick to myself.
Here's hoping it has an impact.
The following link is to a site called "Book A Minute." Great works of literature are boiled down to their essence (as it were) in one or two sentences. My kids, who have had to struggle through some of these classics, found the site to be hilarious!
http://rinkworks.com/bookaminute/classics.shtml
Ha - that's a pretty funny link. I have a feeling I'll end up referencing those summaries.
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