Transcript Lesson 22 Essentials Video: Sentences

YADIRYS: For college, I feel like you need to make a point in every single sentence. There's not one sentence that is just there. There's a reason for each sentence to be there.

CHASE: The best paper isn't the one that's the longest. It's the one where you've cut all the fat off, and there's absolutely nothing you can take away. And it's so dense with information, you're like, if I didn't include that, they would be losing out on a big piece of information.

GRETCHEN: The main point with style is to find a way to write so that all of your ideas connect, and there's a point to your paper.

NIA: Get to the point. That's definitely it. You can speak your mind, and you can show that you're intelligent, but get to the point, because at the end of the day, the professor just wants to know if you know what you're talking about. But they don't have time to hear you talk about it.

MATTHEW: When I write in English, I feel like I want to become better at logic instead of the aesthetic of writing, because in Spanish, when I write in Spanish, it just sounds beautiful, metaphors and similes and hyperbole and all that. And it's OK, because that's how it is in the culture. But when I write in English, people are used to just writing to the point. You got to be precise, clear, say what you have to say.

MARC: Sentence level seemed like a new thing to me when I came to college, because I'd never heard it described, really, that way. I just never really hear in high school, either, how this sentence is a compound sentence, and this sentence is complex. This is simple, like, all that. Never really hear that too much. And never really critiqued or marked down for having the same kind of sentence throughout your paper.

CARA: Every single word should have an impact. And if you're repeating yourself a lot, then you should cut that stuff out and just make it as strong as possible.

AMY: I often get caught up in word usage, and I want a strong verb to try and make a point, but then the content gets lost. And I guess that's a really difficult thing to balance in college writing, is that you want the content to be solid, but you also want to sound good, and you want to get feelings across and moods and have a voice. So that balance is really difficult.

And it's something that I've struggled with, but it's definitely—writing, and practicing writing, helps with that. The more you write—if you you write every day, I mean, the way that your writing evolves is unbelievable. I look back at my freshman papers, and I cannot believe that I wrote that, because my writing now, I feel, is so much stronger.

NANAISSA: It's thinking about every word you're writing, every time you're writing. So if you want to really do it well, it's having a total control on everything.