Sense of Structure, The: Writing from the Reader's Perspective

by George D. Gopen

This composition text provides an insightful guide to writing clearly and effectively . Reflecting on the author's decades of experience as an international writing consultant, writer, and instructor, The Sense of Structure teaches writing from the perspective of readers. This text demonstrates that readers have relatively fixed expectations of where certain words or grammatical constructions will appear in a unit of discourse. By bringing these intuitive reading processes to conscious thought, this text provides students with tools for understanding how readers interact with the structure of writing, from punctuation marks to sentences to paragraphs, and how meaning and purpose are communicated through structure.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Language

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 18, 2004

Reviews

[Yi Cheng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book! Writing in English should be taught as the book shows.

Important lessons:
1. It's the structure that determine the goodness of the sentence. Contents and grammatical correctness have less significant impact compared to the structure.
2. Readers have limited energy to spend on a sentence. Think about how the readers will interpret your sentence when you write. Don't make the readers spend too much energy figuring out the structure of your sentence. When sentences with bad structure appears, patient readers will go through them again, but the majority impatient readers will rush to the end and skip to the next sentences.

[Benni · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read plenty of books on the rules of writing, but this is by far the best, maybe because Gopen shows that there are very few hard-and-fast rules. What may be appropriate in one context may not be in another--it all depends on what your goals are and how you set up the reader's expectations. This book teaches you how to deliver in any arena, be it a book report, college thesis, or a novel. No, I have not mastered what this book teaches, but I'm working on it...

[Jake Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contains amazing advice on clear technical writing. Near all of it was useful and I found myself naturally using its advice almost immediately. The only issue with the book is that it is rather dry and could be difficult to come back to when other more interesting books presented themselves as an opition.

[Kenny Oyama · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm still not a great writer--or even good, for that matter--but I would definitely say that my writing quality has improved after reading this book. This should be a must-read for any writer (especially academics).

[Carlos Scheidegger · Rating 5 out of 5]

The single best book on technical writing I’ve ever read. It’s not a cheap book, but it’s not much longer than Strunk and White, and this one actually has generalizable lessons which the author himself abides by in the writing of the book. Highly, highly recommended.

[George Fischer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent emphasis on the effect of writing, as opposed to the intent.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though much of what Gopen says in terms of structuring prose reiterates the advice of Joseph Williams, he does a nice job of issuing this advice while simultaneously helping writers to understand (1) how to see their writing from the perspective of what readers expect and (2) how to interpret advice about sentence and paragraph-level style decisions within the broader context of a work. He smartly encourages writers to adopt his advice as a series of tools rather than rules, and offers several clear examples of these tools and how they might be interpreted in different contexts to signify his point. Finally, the second part of this book, while in many ways very different from the first, provides a basic and useful review of punctuation that takes into account its history and also helps writers to think about their use of punctuation as yet another tool to structure readers' interpretations. Here, I thought Gopen might have benefited from more examples, but was still taken with his perspective and enjoyed learning a bit about the history of punctuation along the way.

[C. Minos Niu · Rating 4 out of 5]

What resonates with me is that most good technical writers do seem to know how to improve a prose, nonetheless could hardly tell why & how they did the improvement, sometimes not even what they managed to improve.

This book deciphered the mystery: whenever you fit the READER's expectation more, the prose gets better. Thereafter all dots fall in one line: how to write up to the expectations of English readers. Highly recommended.