So, I had to come home this weekend due to family matters, and I totally left my course pack at home. I'm doing this method based off of memory and if I'm right, it's just subject, verb and direct object broken down to just those? Here is a passage from an essay I wrote. I feel that iwas broken down a lot already, so there wasn't much breaking down to do (I think). I guess that's what this exercise is for, right?
One must first understand that Wilde’s views on the purpose of art differ much from the writers during the Romantic era. Wilde feels that historians and art critics who look to the past to find “representative” works of art have no business applying such labels. Art, he feels, is not to inspire or to show things as they really are. He states, “Art never expresses anything but itself” (842). To make something out of a piece of artwork is to apply a false meaning to it. Rather, he notes, “Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself” (839). Wilde, in typical Aesthetic fashion, valued beauty. He felt that the true object of art “…is not simple truth but complex beauty” (836). However, Wilde did not qualify his notion of beauty. Beauty, the superficial quality, could be based on a thousand untruths, but as long as it was beautiful Wilde thought it was worthy of adoration.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hey Shannyn,
ReplyDeleteYou've done a great job with this piece! One thing you can look at next time you do a run-through of this paragraph is find prepositions and re-word those phrases to become more "active" by using "active verbs" or whatnot.
Remember how the speaker in the video accentuated the prepositions? "ON the purpose OF art FROM the writers DURING the Romantic era." Lanham suggests that we (writers) try to stay away from that pattern.
"One must first understand that Wilde's views on art's purpose differs compared to Romantic writers." or "One must first understand that Wilde views art differently compared to Romantic writers."
Not to say that your sentence is bad, or not as good as the two I made attempting to use the Lanham method!!! This is just one of the tactics that he suggests.
Personally, I'm still struggling with finding a happy medium between passive voice and s-v-o sentences. I think it's up to us to find our own good and unique writing style.