 |
Learn English Locally, Apply It Worldwide! Enjoy Regular Practice |
Drama
Syntax controls two essential aspects of any sentence you utter or write: the meaning and the drama. How can you apply drama in your writing?
Drama in a piece of writing
When you'll have to present that piece of writing to prove your skills, you will think twice about the importance of this part of grammar.
Let us consider for a moment what do we mean by drama in the context of creative writing. Drama is virtually the key to all effective writing.
Imagine a three-act play, a thriller. In the first act the crime is committed. In the second the detective makes his investigation. in the third the criminal is discovered. And bang! - The End. Yes, but for this to happen, you (as a writer) kept the reader wanting to continue reading, by keeping the suspense high and keeping the secret till the end.
Now suppose the writer puts the third act in the second place. Would there be a need for the detective's investigation part? No, the audience would now feel free to go home - they've got it! The drama is over and there is nothing left to hold their interest. The 'connected order of things' - the syntax is wrong.
Drama in a sentence
Let us take a simple nursery rhyme line that's used a lot in teaching English: "The cow jumped over the moon." You can put it in a different way, but still keeping the content intact:
"The cow
jumped
over
the moon."
 |
Seeing it like this, step by step, one can see that it is a dramatic sentence. The way the meaning unfolds is exciting, both clear and dramatic. The syntax is good. If one wants to be extravagant or poetic and said "Over the moon jumped the cow." we would get the same result, even slightly more intriguing. |
But now, if one wanted to give he reader more information, for instance that the action took place on a foggy night, one would write "The cow jumped over the moon one foggy night." But here the syntax isn't right. The whole drama is finished and then, as if from nowhere, there's another scene tagging along at the end.
Like in the drama of the play above, remember? When the drama is over, the audience goes home. The same happened here - you read the sentence, get the drama, then you switch off. The last added remark is there, but somehow you don't register it. And if you do, it's only because it's annoying to have to think how to place it into the already 'spent' context. The whole balance of the sentence is upset now.
However, if one said "One foggy night the cow jumped over the moon.", or even "The cow, one foggy night, jumped over the moon." - you feel better about receiving this message, it somehow flows better. The syntax is good in this one, can you feel it?
Our input...
Your output!
Play & Learn!
We publish on Tuesdays;
You enjoy them any day!
English Corner Weekly E-zine
Packed with knowledge, published on Tuesdays.
Get yours here!
Our Archives:
Our lessons in the names and sounds of letters, short & long vowel sounds, CVCs, CCVCs, CVCCs, sight words, vowel and consonant contrasts, etc.
Our lessons will help increase your vocabulary, word recognition, find meaning in context, skills for TOEFL tests and other games, for fun.
Here we shall build some lessons to help you improve your writing skills.
Lots of lessons: cause & effect, comparisons, linking signals, relative clauses, presenting information, expressing emotions and grammar games, of course. We had more lessons on: intensifying adverbs and phrasal verbs, expressing various concepts such as addition, exception, restriction and ambiguity. Lately we started some exercises: likes/dislikes, frequency adverbs (twice), verb tenses, etc.
Learn how to build a website, by using the SBI! system - start from the basics, developing a site concept and a niche, supply and demand, learn about profitability and monetization, payment processing, register domain, website structure and content as a pyramid. Also learn about the tools I'm using to build this website. We also covered how to build traffic, working with search engines, building a good system of inbound links, using social marketing and blogs with the SBI system, how to use Socialize It and Form Build It, how to publish an e-zine and how to build a social network in your niche.
We looked at a few games by now: Countable & uncountable nouns, Free Rice, Name That Thing, Spell It, Spelloween, the Phrasal Verbs Game, Preposition Desert, The Sentence Game, Word Confusion, Word Wangling, Buzzing Bees, and The Verb Viper Game.
Be prepared to play and learn more pretty soon.