Over on Language Log, I’ve posted about a grade-school workbook exercise on writing “interesting” sentences. The instructions were minimal:
A good sentence should be interesting.
“I have a dog” is not a good sentence with which to begin a story. If you are writing a story about your dog that was lost, it would be better to begin the story, “Last week my dog Shep ran away from home.”
Can you change the following sentences into interesting sentences?
On the basis of that, the kids were unleashed on six other sentences, like “I have a bicycle”.
Now, this is a workbook about how to write, so the suggestion is that the problem with the sentences is their form. I looked at two ways in which an English teacher might view such sentences as defective: they “lack vitality” because of their syntax; and they are information-poor (ultimately, a criticism about discourse organization). But of course the sentences (considered with no other context — this is important) are uninteresting because of their content, which is not only minimal but also scarcely gripping. If a stranger came up to me on the street and announced “I have a bicycle”, I’d be worried. (If the stranger was a young child, I wouldn’t be worried at all; kids often confide information that’s important to them. Context, context, context.)
