CONCLUSION. (1)

 
     This book was originally written to discuss how to write sentences and paragraphs; however, it expanded beyond this, to cover expository articles, narrative articles, resumes, and cover-letters.  This conclusion will have the following parts : (a) Summary of content; (b) An added “disclaimer”; (c) A statement concerning the purpose of this book; (d) Some ideas about the future; (e) Various acknowledgments. 
 
     Summary of content. 
 
     The summary of this book is already in the title : “Six Sentences, Nine Paragraphs, and Two Articles”.  This book is a “how to” book, focusing on basic writing skills.  If you can learn and master these writing skills, then your writing will (generally) be all right.  Most of the writing tasks that life demands of you can be found here. 
 
     Sentences.  The sentence is the basic unit of writing.  All other areas of writing depend on this skill.  There are already many books about writing.  This book seeks to add / compliment them, and not compete with them.  Different people have different views on what the “core unit” of writing is : should it be the sentence, or the paragraph, or the article?  This book assumes that it is the sentence, and that all the other “levels” of writing flow from it. 
     I feel that the most important part of effective writing is the ability to write effective sentences.  It is an interesting idea to look at the world (and record it, too) at the sentence level – yet still not lose sight of the “big picture”. 
     I chose to focus on six basic sentence structures, focusing on the clauses.  Hence, the “six sentence types”.  Of course, there are others, but knowing these six can help you through most of the writing situations you will encounter in your daily life.  Each of the “sentence types” has its own use in writing, its own “character”, and its own demands on you, the writer.  The sentence types are relatively simple to use, yet they have a wide range of applications. 
     Learning to make beautiful, effective sentences is like polishing individual gems, which will later be assembled into a larger piece of jewelry.  Writing a good sentence forces you to think carefully, weighing various factors, so as to create a complete unit of thought.  Having a “sentence plan” allows you to carefully structure your sentence, and say what you need (and want) to say.  By now, you realize that I like “structure” and “plans” very much : I just feel that they have a certain, partial place in the creation of effective writing, especially if English is not your “mother-tongue”. 
     Throughout this section on writing sentences, the focus has been on following the structure of the sentence.  However, being “synthetically creative” with the content – that is, “freedom and creativity, within structural limits” – is also important.  At some point, all this emphasis on “structure, structure, structure” will become redundant, and your inner creativity will be free to operate as it wishes, with the structure appearing automatically.  It is, in effect, a kind of “writing automaticity” (c.f., Chall). 
     “Writing is a process”, and at the sentence level, this means that one’s written ideas can be revised and improved, many times.