THEME THURSDAY: FAMOUS NOVEL OPENINGS ('THE GOOD SOLDIER')
03 / 11 / 2016
THEME THURSDAY: FAMOUS NOVEL OPENINGS ('THE GOOD SOLDIER'): meaning and examples
Hello readers and good morning!
November is celebrated as National Novel Writing Month. During this month, writers are challenged to write EVERY DAY until they write 50,000 words. It started in 1999 and only 6 people finished that year; in 2014, over 40,000 completed their novel!
To celebrate, we are looking at some famous first lines from novels. We will talk about why the line is important, and we will also look at the grammar of the sentence.
We begin with the first line from Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier (1915).
Sentence: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
What a great way to begin a novel!
Notice that the sentence uses a superlative: The SADDEST story.
It also uses the Present Perfect in relation to something that began in the past and has a connection to now (=past experience). To learn more about this use of the present perfect, check out a previous Daily Vitamin posts.
https://www.ziggurat.es/es/lecciones_ingles/index.asp?id=2428
That's all for today. Thanks for reading! And speaking of reading, we highly recommend Ford's book. Check it out!
November is celebrated as National Novel Writing Month. During this month, writers are challenged to write EVERY DAY until they write 50,000 words. It started in 1999 and only 6 people finished that year; in 2014, over 40,000 completed their novel!
To celebrate, we are looking at some famous first lines from novels. We will talk about why the line is important, and we will also look at the grammar of the sentence.
We begin with the first line from Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier (1915).
Sentence: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
What a great way to begin a novel!
Notice that the sentence uses a superlative: The SADDEST story.
It also uses the Present Perfect in relation to something that began in the past and has a connection to now (=past experience). To learn more about this use of the present perfect, check out a previous Daily Vitamin posts.
https://www.ziggurat.es/es/lecciones_ingles/index.asp?id=2428
That's all for today. Thanks for reading! And speaking of reading, we highly recommend Ford's book. Check it out!
