A Wedding in Brownsville
Language: sentence variety and stress
Write lively prose and stress long words correctly.
Sentence variety: a long run of sentences of the same length and pattern is dull. Varying their length and pattern gives a lively style.
Singer mixes his sentences well: in one model paragraph, ten sentences range from 7 to 29 words, and include simple, compound, complex and compound-complex sentences.
His tenses also follow time carefully: the story's present is in the past tense; Margolin's distant past is in the past perfect (he had been a prodigy); and his hopes and expectations use 'would'.
Stress in long words: one syllable carries the primary (strongest) stress, and another may carry a weaker secondary stress, as in af-ter-NOON.
More examples: un-der-STAND, ref-u-GEE, in-vi-TA-tion.
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