Watch Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft

2025
1 Season

In Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft, Professor Brooks Landon from the University of Iowa—one of the nation's top writing schools—shows you the pleasure in reading and writing great sentences. Explore the stylistic rewards (and risks) of various forms, learn how to build and appreciate effective and elegant sentences, and get unique insights into the nature of great writing.

Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft is a series that is currently running and has 1 seasons (23 episodes). The series first aired on May 8, 2025.

Filter by Source

Rent or Buy Subscription

Amazon Prime Amazon

Do you have Prime Video?

What are you waiting for?

Nice! Browse Prime Video with Yidio.

Ad Info

Seasons

24. Sentences and Prose Style

May 8, 2025

How do our sentences fit into prose style? In exploring critical approaches to this issue, Professor Landon emphasizes that prose style can be seen as both a problem and a gift passed on from writer to writer.

23. Sentences in Sequence

May 8, 2025

Move beyond the sentence and on to the impact of several sentences in sequence and see new possibilities of resonance and relationship among their rhythms and structures.

22. Master Sentences

May 8, 2025

The opposite of the minimal base clause is the master sentence: a very long sentence that can function in remarkably original and controlled ways. While no formula can anticipate the context and purpose of master sentences, you can construct effective ones by combining a number of the strategies from earlier lectures.

21. Balanced Series and Serial Balances

May 8, 2025

Sentence balance is an extension of the organizational constructs of human consciousness. Explore the prevalence of balanced rhythm in our speech and writing and look at numerous examples of sentence balance.

19. The Rhythm of Twos

May 8, 2025

Binary oppositions in balanced sentences lend confidence and conclusiveness to writing. With its mirroring effect, the duple (double-beat) rhythm gives balanced sentences the power to stay lodged in your mind.

18. Balanced Sentences and Balanced Forms

May 8, 2025

Perhaps the most intense form of the periodic/suspensive sentence is the balanced sentence. Professor Landon points out that balanced sentences, in drawing their strength from the tension between variation and repetition, offer an advantage to writers comparing two subjects.

17. Prefab Patterns for Suspense

May 8, 2025

Another option for adding suspense to sentences is starting them with certain prompts such as "if" or "since." This lecture illustrates the uses of these and other prompts and considers some reasons for making suspense a critical part of your prose style.

16. The Mechanics of Delay

May 8, 2025

Look closely at four broad tactics to delay completing the base clause, two of which involve the manipulation of modifiers and two of which use initial clauses or phrases as either extended subjects or as modifiers. You also consider a possible fifth tactic that involves using a colon or semicolon.

15. Degrees of Suspensiveness

May 8, 2025

In this lecture, you unpack the periodic/suspensive sentence, which suggests a greater degree of control over its material and, when used effectively, can generate interest by combining complex concepts with syntactical suspense.

14. Cumulative Syntax to Create Suspense

May 8, 2025

Learn to start thinking about sentences as not just "loose" or "periodic" but as possessing degrees of suspense. Base clauses in a cumulative sentence can be moved about or split to increase or decrease the reader's suspense about how the sentence will end.

13. The Riddle of Prose Rhythm

May 8, 2025

Follow along with scholars and critics as they try to study, measure, and explain the mystery of prose rhythm. Learn to better recognize the distinctive rhythms that characterize your sentences by imagining their modifying levels as long or short bits of Morse code.

12. Prompts of Explanation

May 8, 2025

Prompts can also speculate about the unknown. Examine three major prompts

11. Prompts of Comparison

May 8, 2025

Prompts like "as if," "as though," and "like" can prompt writers to look for metaphors, similes, or speculative phrases that add information, clarification, and imaginative appeal to sentences. Learn how writers forge emotional links with their readers by incorporating figurative language into their writing.

10. Subordinate and Mixed Cumulatives

May 8, 2025

Continuing the discussion of various cumulative sentence patterns, Professor Landon zeroes in on subordinate and mixed patterns, which offer more variety to sentences by adding specificity or tapping into the strengths of both coordinate and subordinate patterns.

9. Coordinate Cumulative Sentences

May 8, 2025

This lecture elaborates on coordinate cumulative patterns, which pile up modifying phrases that point back to the base clause. It also emphasizes the importance of listening to how your sentences read as a means of tightening up their logic.

8. Coordinate, Subordinate, and Mixed Patterns

May 8, 2025

With your newfound understanding of the relationship between base clauses and modifying phrases, you examine the three major patterns of cumulative sentences and their effect on the base clause: coordinate (refining information), subordinate (providing new information), and mixed (combining the previous two patterns).

7. Direction of Modification

May 8, 2025

Cumulative sentences also employ modifying words and phrases before, between, or at the end of base clauses. Investigate the benefits and potential risks of each of these placement options on the meaning of your sentences.

6. The Rhythm of Cumulative Syntax

May 8, 2025

Cumulative sentences lend themselves to writing moves that almost guarantee more effective sentences. Learn how these easy-to-write sentences take you through increasingly specific sentence levels and how they clarify and embellish preceding phrases.

5. Adjectival Steps

May 8, 2025

Professor Landon makes the case for using adjectival strategies to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sentences. Boiling down subordinate clauses to single modifying words allows you to pack more information into each sentence.

4. How Sentences Grow

May 8, 2025

Adding propositional content to a kernel sentence "They slept" moves sentences forward and enriches their meaning. Here are three types of strategies that give sentences more momentum and depth: the connective, the subordinative, and the adjectival.

3. Propositions and Meaning

May 8, 2025

A sentence may contain more propositions than are visible in the grammar and syntax of its surface language. Discover how the facts, ideas, and feelings in a sentence lie beneath its words and organization.

2. Grammar and Rhetoric

May 8, 2025

Examine some of the key terminology used throughout the course and focus on learning how sentences work (their rhetoric) instead of merely labeling their constituent parts (their grammar).

1. A Sequence of Words

May 8, 2025

Building great sentences depends on more than just stringing words together. This lecture explores the definition of a sentence and introduces several assumptions on which the course rests, such as that a greater control of syntax is one of the most direct routes to improving writing skills.

Description

Where to Watch Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft

Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft is available for streaming on the The Great Courses website, both individual episodes and full seasons. You can also watch Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft on demand at Amazon Prime and Amazon.