25 Great Sentences and How They Got That Way

This handy, practical guide prompts would-be writers to think critically about how to create effective and meaningful sentences. Woods (Grammar for Dummies), former director of the Horace Mann School’s Independent Study program, selects examples from novelists (Toni Morrison, Ann Beattie), journalists (Red Smith), poets (Martín Espada), and public figures (Neil Armstrong, JFK). She opens each chapter with one of the promised “25 great sentences,” providing a brief analysis of how it illustrates a certain literary device and then additional example sentences to reinforce her point. These include parallelism in Li-Young Lee’s poem “From Blossoms,” shifting word meaning in Joyce’s Ulysses (“Love loves to love love”), and onomatopoeia in Watty Piper’s The Little Engine That Could. Woods’s selections mix classroom staples (Romeo and Juliet) and contemporary classics (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me), and she also displays a winning enthusiasm for language, as when she illustrates the coinage of new words with Phil Rizzuto’s invention of the verb nonchalanting, or provides a sidebar on the tangled etymology of the word beatnik. This volume should be helpful for students, and older readers will recall memories of favorite English teachers leading them through the intricacies of writing. Agent: Sophia Seidner, Jill Grinberg Literary Management. (Aug.)