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Topic : Re: Does this sentence make sense grammatically? Is there anything I can do to improve it? "The meticulously placed masses of skin under her eyes were captured involuntarily by the customary - selfpublishingguru.com

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I found the sentence hard to read. I do not think that the problem is so much awkward grammar as it is excessive cognitive load. The sentence as written requires the reader to hold quite a number of concepts in their mind until the end of the sentence in order to understand it. There does not seem to be any rhythmic structure such as parallelism to organize the concepts. So, not a shining example.
What to do to fix it?
The first question is what is the purpose of the sentence. It appears to be descriptive but I am not at all sure. So the first step on the road to excellence is to clarify the purpose of the sentence. Only you can do that.
The second question is how to accomplish that purpose. You can pick a point of view, a narrator, the distance of the narrator from the story, the language and vocabulary used, the velocity of the text, the expected cognitive load, and so much more.
So who is telling this story? Are they telling the story as it unfolds or recounting past events? Is the narrator a player in the story or some form of historian? Are they low-brow or high-brow in the sense of the language that they use? Do they typically express their thought in long sentences, short sentences, mixed and varied sentences, or grunts? What is the expected level of cleverness of the readers?
My sense is that you are a beginning writer. What I would suggest to a beginning writer is to experiment with different approaches to the scene from which this sample sentence is taken. Pick a POV, a narrator, and so on. Write the corresponding scene. Make different picks and write again. None of these have to be polished, ready to publish scenes. You do not even have to finish a given scene; if it is not working, then it is not worth the effort to finish. When you have a handful or two of these scenes, pull out the trusty compare-and-contrast analysis tool. Enumerate the good and bad aspects of each scene. At some point you will recognize that one set of options works better than any of the other options.
To be fair, you might have to do this kind of analysis for each scene in your work.


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