Thanks to a link on Kottke yesterday, we were clued in to some pretty hip tips for tricking out our sentences, David Foster Wallace-style. Originally hatched by one James Tanner, there’s a step-by-step guide for making your hum-drum sentences book-deal ready! To see whether the tricks really worked, we gave a batch of Flavorwire contributors the guide, and the same sentence. See the winning effort out of our offices, after the jump. And, if you think you can top it, we’ve got a heck of a prize for you.
The phrase, to start, reads:
Sascha enjoyed the movie. He liked the book more.
Eli’s winning version — super extra bonus points for suggestive phrasing: “The movie was known to contain a smattering of hot nude scenes, but Sascha deeply admired the book’s saucy adjectives and some of its meaty verbs passionately — he is a sucker for a steaming-hot adjective — and, most of all, its little, carefully placed subordinate clauses, long words filled delicately with short vowels, little phrases and fragments of sentences that come to an end in rock-hard consonants, like a little boulder at the terminal point of a subterranean passageway.”
If you think you can beat that, hot-shot, post your DFWallacized version of our starting phrase in the comments below. We’ll select a winner by the end of the week, who will receive a bundle of brand-new books from the Flavorwire library. Now, go grow those sentences!