The Writers’ Painting: Paragraphs Part 2

…I walked through the kitchen and saw the yellow plate on the table it had green flowers and a cupcake was sitting on it with red and purple frosting this reminded me. Of a hat that purple was kind of ugly and then, suddenly it came out of the door. Way seriously I wasn’t expecting it to come that fast or that freakily…

I’m sure that many of you can point out the glaring errors in the above paragraph. I cannot tell how many times I have seen paragraph after paragraph like this in a bio on one of my forums. 

This series is based on the concept of viewing a paragraph as though it is a painting. The best way to visualize this is to think of a painting of a forest. Your entire paper, bio, creative writing assignment, is the whole picture. You have trees, rocks, birds, most times a river or a path. The paragraphs in your paper are those different elements. Each one is a theme all it’s own. Your starting sentence, the topic sentence, of each paragraph says if it is going to be a tree in your painting or a bird. The sentences inside your paragraph are the brush strokes that make it into that bird or tree, and in order to make sure that you have a fully formed tree, you must must must make sure your sentences are structured properly. 

The two biggest things writers tend to struggle with are run-on and fragment sentences. The best way to think of them is this way:

- A run-on sentence tells more than one thought without stopping. It’s like the stroke of a paintbrush that the artist forgot to stop moving, leaving a big black line across the canvas.

- A fragment is the opposite. It’s an incomplete thought, as though the artist kept stopping and jerked the brush through the canvas. 

The opening paragraph is a great example of these two things.

“…I walked through the kitchen and saw the yellow plate on the table it had green flowers and a cupcake was sitting on it with red and purple frosting this reminded me. Of a hat that purple was kind of ugly and then, suddenly it came out of the door. Way seriously I wasn’t expecting it to come that fast or that freakily…”

Let’s begin by breaking down each of these sentences:

1) I walked through the kitchen and saw the yellow plate on the table it had green flowers and a cupcake was sitting on it with red and purple frosting, this reminded me.

2)Of a hat that purple was kind of ugly and then, suddenly it came out of the door.

3) Way seriously I wasn’t expecting it to come that fast or that freakily.

Sentence 1 is a massive run-on sentence. There are two distinct thoughts and the beginning of a third. It should be broken apart into the individual thoughts like so:

“I walked through the kitchen and saw the yellow plate on the table. It had green flowers. A cupcake was sitting on it with red and purple frosting. That reminded me…”

The second sentence is a fragment. Obviously the thought is not complete as it starts in the middle. You need to combine it with the fragment “That reminded me”, and create:

“This reminded me of a hat.”

Then continue on to create the two independent sentences that remain:

“That purple was kind of ugly. Then, suddenly it came out of the door.”

Sentence three, while not the best sentence ever, is grammatically sound and doesn’t need and major overhauling. 

With these edits, you now have your brush strokes creating your tree or rock. Put all together, it now looks something like this:

“I walked through the kitchen and saw the yellow plate on the table. It had green flowers. A cupcake was sitting on it with red and purple frosting. This reminded me of a hat. That purple was kind of ugly. Then suddenly it came out of the door. Way seriously I wasn’t expecting it to come that fast or that freakily.”

The next section will deal with punctuation, or adding color to your painting.