Sentences!

I am taking a class: Scholarly Research and Writing. Our final assignment is to behave like we are writing our Masters Theses, and write the first ten pages. In her review, my professor wrote that I have some ideas worth developing. She also wrote that my sentences were "in need of an overhaul!"

In our previous class meeting, she had used two sentences I wrote as examples of simple sentences. Both began with a subject and proceeded to a verb and direct object. I became paranoid. My state of mind was compounded by my ignorance of my subject for the paper and the short span of time I was able to spend writing it. My sentences were bubble wrap, my pronouns' antecedents were incomplete ideas, and I knew both these facts.

Still, my feelings were hurt.

Now I'm sentence-trigger-shy. The sentence preceding this one you are currently reading should not be written, according to Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers, au.'s, The Bedford Handbook. It has my own neologism in it: bad! I am also afraid of imprecise pronouns currently.

"I'll warm up my writing muscles by responding to something," I thought. The Library of America sends me emails with links to their story of the week. To read this week's story and write something about it was my plan. This week's story was by Henry James.

Strictly speaking, as a person with a not-insubstantial amount of education, I do not consider myself to be superstitious, which of course is what most people say before they make some kind of outrageous occultist claim, but I quickly came to regard the fact that this week's featured writer was Mr. James as a portent: of what exactly, however, I could not say with a satisfactory degree of certainty.

By the way, I looked for a Hemingway story, and the one I found wasn't much better. Plus, he wrote things like, "the tree," as if that was all you needed to know about it.