Messy, Messy, Messy – Sentence Structure #1 (Missing Verbs)

Messy, Messy, Messy Sentence Structure

Let me start with a housekeeping note: No I’m not talking about washing floors or windows. I’m going to be trying out some new things with my blog and posts. Bear with me as I try out some new looks etc. I’ve been looking around on some blogs, and I think mine could be put together better. I may be wiping this one and starting over. Not sure about that yet. I might need to remove and repost my old blogs. If I do that I’ll be improving them.

Now onto today’s post.

No matter how perfect I think, my writing is, it’s still messy. I have all kinds of errors, some obvious and some not. To work this out, I wade through the swamp of editing and revision. Prophecy Ink is coming along well. I thought I would share some of the mess and what I did to fix it.

At this point, I had the book revised twice.

I talked about this in my last post. I’m using Grammarly to edit and below are some stats on what I have to work on.

Contextual Spelling: 349
Grammer: 212
Punctuation: 999+ (Um that’s embarrassing)
Sentence Structure: 19
Style: 127
Vocabulary Enhancement: 267

Okay so I promised I’d be honest from the start, and this is… embarrassing. Or is it?  No, I suppose it’s not really since I know I’m not perfect and I’m not a professional writer(Yet).

When Grammarly underlines all of these issues, the page gets messy. It seems a daunting task to cover all of these issues and fix them. It is, but it’s not at the same time. This is my book, my work of art and my passion. So perfecting it is part of the process. It’s like raising a kid, it’s not always pretty, it can get hectic, tedious, and even boring at times but it’s also exciting, amazing, rewarding and even fun.

When I find a sentence that is just crap, focus on it and repair it to perfection it’s rewarding.

For today I’ll look at Sentence structure since it’s the least abundant.

The first example is a short paragraph. It has 4 issues.
Sentence structure: missing Verb
Vocabulary Enhancement: Overused word Bad
Punctuation:  , and
Vocabulary Enhancement: Overused word wide

Normally I do my edit with Grammarly with all features turned on. For this example, I’ll show what the Sentence structure feature helped me with.

To address the issue of the missing verb, I added “It’s a” to the sentence. Or

I took the sentence out completely and melded it with the first sentence. Editing isn’t about only fixing the immediate issue, it’s an opportunity to write a better sentence. I read the sentence before and the one with the problem and the one after. After two changes I came up with “I nodded and rubbed the small scrape on my forehead.” I covered all the information I wanted to convey, with fewer words and ended up with a sentence that is structured better.

Here are some common sentence structure problems found.
Incorrect word order
Missing Verb
Squinting Modifier
Incorrect Adverb Placement
Missing _____ in emphatic sentence
I will cover these corrections in future posts. And yes I will be using real examples from my new book.

My advice about Missing Verbs:

A great opportunity to fix the entire sentence not just plop in the missing verb. Sure sometimes all you need to do is add the verb and that’s okay too. 

-Sheryl

I couldn’t think of how to fit today’s prompt in other than to say I’ve been listening to classical and string quartet music while editing lately along with a bunch of other genres. Music helps keep my mind from wandering off task. 

Copyright © 2018 All rights reserved

Quartet