Our word choices give a sentence its luster, and they deserve intense attention.

Writers dream of sentences that sail through the waters of thought. We try to control their shape and size, and we struggle to let them glide, rather than thrash at sea.

Ultimately, whether we are writing posts, paragraphs, essays, arguments, memoirs, monographs or even just the Great American Tweet, writing is and should be a grand adventure.

There is no one way to render an idea. Let’s explore how masters of the sentence play with length and style to make their sentences distinctive.

Some of the worst writing around suffers from inert verbs and the unintended use of the passive voice. Yet the passive voice remains an important arrow in the rhetorical quiver. After all, it exists for a reason.

I’m a sucker for this stuff. The @ is called chiocciola (snail) in Italian! The & was once taught as a letter of the alphabet! The manicule has been with us for a millennium! Thank you, Keith Houston, for bringing these little mysteries out of the shadows of typographic history.

In writing, the connection between storyteller and audience is just as important. By using some subtle devices, a narrator can reach out to the reader and say, 'We’re in this together.'