MY NAME IS KO MAL FROM SHI MLA THIS IS MY SOME POINTS ABOUT BEAUTIFUL HANDWRITING
Beautiful writing makes you think
We’ve all heard the classic titles tossed around as examples of beautiful writing, but why have they considered classics? Often they’re ahead of their time, like To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee or 1984 by George Orwell.
They tackle topics that make their readers think and reconsider the world they’re living in. And they often inspire their readers to do whatever they can to change it. That’s what makes them timeless. That’s what makes the writing so beautiful.
Beautiful writing makes you feel something,
think about a book that made you laugh recently, or cry. A book that can make you do something like that is a work of art. If it incenses you, evokes tears, or makes you feel something strongly you end up thinking about it even when you’re not reading it, that’s amazing. The books I end up recommending to my friends are ones that have made me weep or laugh so hard I’ve almost woken up my dog.
Beautiful writing paints a picture
The best descriptions are the ones that make you see something clearly without needing a picture. When you can see warts, hooked nose, and crooked fingers of the evil witch. When you can smell the fresh, warm cookies and bitter lemonade at the summer picnic. When you can hear the creaking of the shuddering house, the tapping of bare branches against the dusty windows. When you get swept up in the beauty of the story, you forget you’re reading a book instead of walking through a completely different world.
How do you pick the most beautiful sentences in literature?
- Are beautiful sentences full of nice turns of phrase?
- Or are beautiful sentences full of wisdom?
- Must beautiful sentences be full of risk and ambition, or can they be subtle and simple?
- Must beautiful sentences make you feel something?
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I’m also not going for what I would call an “instructional sentence.” I’d compiled hundreds of great sentences in a file of mine, but when I examined it, I realized most of them were designed to teach something to the reader. They contained some technique, some trick, some device that could be learned and replicated. The sentences below can be learned from, but that’s not their primary beauty. They are beautiful for the sake of beauty itself.
One last criterion for longer sentences: I want to see a narrative. By a narrative, I mean some kind of turn from the beginning to the end. It doesn’t have to be a surprise, although it’s usually surprising. There needs to be a shift, an evolution, a gradation by the end. If the beautiful sentence ends, and I’m still in the same place where I started, that’s a problem.
- I limited myself to modern authors, and authors writing in the last 50 years or so because there are many websites that list classic lines of literature, and I don’t want to repeat them.
- I’m also limiting the list to one submission per author.
- I’ve also decided to opt for beautiful sentences under 100 words, because anything past that becomes its own beast, and it’s unfair for a 10-word sentence to have to compare to an epic monster sentence (If you want longer sentences, look at the longest sentences in English).
- I’m picking virtually all of these from fiction, not nonfiction (except one — find it if you can), and I’m not picking the first lines of books because those deserve their own list.
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