BUILDING GREAT SENTENCES Exploring a Writer's Craft

In this series of 24 lectures, Brooks Landon, professor of English at the University of Iowa, offers writers a philosophy and a practical strategy meant to help them produce sentences that are engaging, information packed, and effective. Professor Landon doesn't provide a particularly broad survey of the writer's craft but instead dwells on teaching listeners how to create "cumulative sentences"; that is, sentences in which core subject-predicate clauses attain specificity, detail, and color by the piling on of modifying phrases. Landon knows his subject, and he speaks clearly and persuasively, if somewhat stiffly. But his cheerful reading of the lectures' many extended sample sentences, with their long strings of modifiers spilling out endlessly, eventually tried the patience of this reviewer. M.G. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: AUGUST 2009]