Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft
Overview
Course No. 2368
Professor Brooks Landon teaches the art of sentence construction through:
- 24 lectures on crafting effective, rhythmic prose
- Analysis of cumulative, periodic and balanced sentence structures
- Techniques from master writers like Woolf and DeLillo
- Practical exercises to develop your unique writing style
Learn how sentence-level mastery transforms good writing into great literature.
Video Lessons
Foundations of Sentence Craft
- What Makes a Sentence (34 min)
Defining sentences and their importance - Grammar vs. Rhetoric (30 min)
How sentences work vs. how they’re labeled - Propositions & Meaning (30 min)
The ideas beneath surface words
Cumulative Sentence Techniques
- Sentence Growth (30 min)
Connective, subordinative and adjectival strategies - Adjectival Efficiency (29 min)
Packing information into modifiers
6-10. Cumulative Patterns (155 min total)
Coordinate, subordinate and mixed structures
Creating Suspense & Rhythm
11-12. Prompt Words (62 min total)
“As if,” “because” and other thought triggers
- Prose Rhythm (32 min)
The musicality of sentence structure
14-17. Suspense Techniques (122 min total)
Delaying closure and periodic sentences
Balanced Writing
18-21. Rhythmic Patterns (120 min total)
The power of twos and threes in sentences
Advanced Techniques
- Master Sentences (30 min)
Controlled complexity in long sentences - Sentence Sequences (32 min)
How sentences work together - Developing Style (32 min)
Making sentence craft your own

