Recipe Tweak - 1st Sentence ReWrites

With great trepidation, I scattered the dust on my collection of final papers for the past 18 months of doctoral classes. After making a list of the first sentences, my face was in a perpetual pucker. Please let me apologize now to all my poor suffering professors. Regretfully, there are many sour sentences to choose from. So for the sake of my self-esteem, I chose only three to review and rewrite.

How do I take sentences like these and not send the reader into a coma after the first period? Let’s start at the beginning by comparing the content of the sentence to some that I like (see “Add Salt”) then reconstruct the words.

Sentence 1:

“The plow or plough is an agricultural tillage tool, one of the earliest designed tools continually use through history.” - A Visual Exploration of the Plow

Yawn. The sentence is archaic academia. I see a sentence like that and think, “Wow! I bored my professor before I started.”

This sentence is focused on an object much like the sentence from The Plantation Hoe and Cultural Rhetoric of Women’s Corsets. Both use personification to enhance the sentence. Let's try personifying the plow: “immortal plow.” Also, there is some alliteration with “tillage tool” which I can expand to: “agricultural tillage tool trudging through history.” Next is to include the word “art.” Put it together and I have… Ta dah! “The immortal plow is an agricultural tillage tool which has trudged through history seeding the arts.” Are you interested now? This might have been a fluke. Let’s see if I can do it again.

Sentence 2:

“Edgar Allan Poe is credited as the “Father of Detective Stories” creating a template for detective stories through three short stories: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter”.” – Cluing In to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Clews”

You have no clue how much fun I had reading these stories and writing this paper. Sure it was academic but it was far from boring. 

Narrative and Class in a Culture of Consumption and The Ideas in Things shared some similar qualities. Using them as a template, I focused on alliteration, allusion, metaphor and idiom. I use “stories” a lot (3x in 1 sentence) so why not play with that: “stories of slashers, the Seine and sheets in plain sight.” Once I wrote that, I was able to write the remainder: “Edgar Allan Poe created three stories of slashers, the Seine and sheets in plain sight molding mystery and a new type of detective fiction on the page.” I may have to watch the alliteration use because it can be overdone.

Sentence 3:

“Museums have been and continue to be part of the landscape of major and growing towns and cities since the 1700s.”  – Paris Museums and Early Modern Urban Planning

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz. Oh! There’s more? 

For this sentence I settled on Age of Homespun and New Historicism and Cultural Materialism’s sentences which use metaphor, simile, idiom and oxymoron (alliteration not included).  Let’s try metaphor: “museums are” …  “the heart of an urban landscape”… “seeds in the Paris’ urban landscape.” Now a simile: “and like Josephine’s roses they bloom and thrive amidst the brick and concrete.” All together now: “Museums are seeds in the Pariasian urban landscape and, like Josephine’s roses, they bloom amidst the garden of brick and concrete.”

So, how’d I do?

Word Count: 575

Total Edits: 0