Sentence

The sentence is the fundamental artistic unit of prose writing. There are many rules about what constitutes a grammatically correct sentence, and good writing is expected to follow those rules—except when deliberately breaking them to achieve some effect. Sentences are composed of words, and paragraphs are composed of one or more sentences. An excess of poorly constructed sentences can affect the Word World in ways that will ruin an agent's day.

For the other kind of sentence, i.e. a Mary Sue's lawful punishment for crimes against good writing, logic, and canon, see "Assassination."

Basic Sentence Construction

The simplest rules of sentence construction are:

1. The first word of a sentence must be capitalized.
2. A sentence must end with a period (a.k.a. a full stop) or other terminal punctuation.
   • A sentence may never end with a comma, colon, or semicolon.
3. Sentences should contain at least one clause composed of a subject (who/what does a thing) and a predicate (the thing done and who/what it is done to). In other words, no sentence fragments.
   • A sentence may not join multiple independent (stand-alone) clauses with commas or other inappropriate punctuation; no run-on sentences.
4. A sentence should contain a complete, meaningful thought.
5. Sentences should not be too long or too short.

Failing to follow the rules is bad because it makes your writing confusing and difficult to read. If it isn't clear where one sentence ends and the next begins, the meaning of each is lost, and your audience has to spend time trying to figure out what you meant instead of what you said. It's rude to make your readers do all the work of sorting out a mess that should have been cleaned up before you published, and the harder you make it for them, the less likely they are to stick around.

But good writers know that composing sentences is a high art, not merely a paint-by-numbers, and the rules can be thrown out the window if they would get in the way of the bigger picture. Some commonly touted "rules" aren't even rules at all—for instance, you are absolutely allowed to start a sentence with a conjunction like "and" or "but." You may have been taught to avoid this because falling into a habit of starting your sentences with "and" or "but" would get repetitive and annoying very quickly, but that doesn't mean you can't do it at all. It's best to follow the rules most of the time, but sometimes—just sometimes, if you know what you're doing—it's okay to break them.

The palette of a sentence involves word choice, word order, level of formality, and flow. These elements combined in different ways can make sentences that are short and to the point, long and meandering, dense and official, elegant and musical, and everything in between. Sentences should be crafted according to their purpose: short sentences to communicate actions taking place in quick succession, formal sentences to describe a serious subject, wandering sentences if a character is daydreaming, and so forth. If you are writing from a particular character's point of view, your sentence construction should also reflect the way that character thinks.

Each sentence is a brush stroke, and just like you would paint a picture using different colors and strokes, so too should you use a variety of sentence structures to bring your writing to life. If you find yourself consistently writing sentences that, e.g., start with the same word, or have a comma in the same place, or are all about the same length, change it up.

Sentence Construction for Dialogue

As a writer of narrative fiction, it's important to understand how to write good dialogue, and that starts with constructing it properly. Dialogue sentences are a bit different from narrative sentences. The details can be tricky to grasp, but once you understand them, they'll become second nature to you.

Anatomy of a Dialogue

A line of dialogue typically has two parts: a speech and a dialogue tag. The speech is the words being said, and is always set in quotation marks. The dialogue tag identifies the speaker. In the following example, the speech has a dotted underline, and the dialogue tag has a solid underline.

"The console is beeping," said the agent.

The dialogue tag doesn't always have to go after the speech. It can go at the beginning or in the middle, too.

The agent said, "The console is beeping."

"The console," said the agent, "is beeping."

The above dialogue tags have all been speech tags, which are appended to a speech as part of the same sentence. Speakers may also be identified with action tags, which are separate sentences in the same paragraph.

The agent facepalmed. "The console is beeping again. I can't believe it."

"The console is beeping again." The agent facepalmed. "I can't believe it."

"The console is beeping again. I can't believe it." The agent facepalmed.

Bad Sentences and the PPC

Poorly composed sentences are known to affect the Word World of a fanfiction. Excessive run-ons and other improperly punctuated sentences can make events seem to zip along at high speed, cause multiple events to happen at once, or make it hard for the agents to breathe. Sentence fragments may have sharp edges that can cut an unwary agent.