#example sentence

[ī.kó.cʰē.fé hí.kín kʰí.gè ɖʐú nē]

ikóche -fé híkín khígè dzhû ne

NPST.eat -OPT meat cub deer.INDF.ACC.SG 1SG.NOM

For starters I’m going to share a very short list of new words that I’m learning! (With a hopefully good example sentence!)

학기 : semester.

학기가 시작 되었습니다.

교환 학생 : exchange student

교환 학생입니다.

작가 : writer

그 작가는 피곤해요.

격려하다 : to encourage

First: cut everything from "The way he stared at her!" to "the face of her newborn child." All of these analogies here are awkward and superfluous.

Then restructure and cut down the next paragraph, you want the elegance of the syntax to match the elegance of what you're describing:

"Through his awe-struck eyes I noticed her in a new light- how her skin looked like russet silk in the firelight, the perfect curve of her lips, how her long lashes brushed her cheeks as she looked down."

This still isn't perfect, I personally think meyer overuses the word "russet" to describe the indigenous characters but for this example I wanted to keep the content of the sentence more or less the same. Cutting out the unnecessary description of her teeth keeps the flow of the sentence intact which is why I removed that bit.

"His wondering eyes made me notice new things about her" is an awkward sentence for a few reasons:

It puts Bella in the back seat of her own observations. Why are his eyes making you do anything ma'am? Haven't you any eyes of your own? My alternative utilizes active voice to make it clear that Bella is the one noticing both Jared's eyes and Kim's face.

"wondering" is a real word but it's very difficult to not read it as "wandering" at first as the phrase "his wandering eyes" is more common than "his wondering eyes." "Wondering" is more typically used in the context of "I was just wondering..." similar to how "awesome" has become more casual in usage than it's original meaning.

The flow of this sentence is off. It's twisted around itself in a way that makes the reader have to pause, say the sentence out loud, and actively figure out what meyer is describing. My alternative is also "reversed" (the sub-clause comes first) but it's also very neatly in two parts: "through his awe-struck eyes" is the descriptive sub-clause, it can be moved to the end without changing the meaning (though I put it at the beginning because it sounds neater imo). "I noticed her in a new light" is active voice, this is the main clause and the purpose of the sentence.

"I noticed new things about her" is simply clunky and doesn't mesh well with the rest of smeyers purple prose that follows.

Finally I restructured the list after the em-dash for both clarity/neatness and variety. First, if we look at just the beginning words of meyers list it reads "how, how, how, how." It's consistent which can sometimes be pleasant in a list but it is also boring. "How" is not improperly used at any point but it does get grating when it's used 4x in a row. "How" can be replaced with "the way" in this context so I do agree with using "how" simply for the sake of flow.

However, in the description of Kim's lips in particular, it forces the description into a structure befitting the use of "how" in a way that sounds unnatural. I shortened that description to "the perfect curve of her lips" because that is the feature that needed to shine here. Phrasing it as "how the shape of her lips was a perfect curve" is extraordinarily long and again, twisted around what was supposed to be the defined feature. It is difficult to tell if Bella is highlighting "shape," "lips," or "perfect curve."

photo source

The Linguistic Society of America has guidelines for inclusive language, including what one might consider when writing example sentences:

“The use of ‘gender-neutral’ names such as Chris, Dana, Kim, Lee, and Pat can help avoid stereotyping either males or females.”

But how neutral are these names, really? It probably depends, and it probably changes over time. Meredith used to be “a boy’s name”, but I don’t know of any men named Meredith these days, and I know a lot of women named Meredith.

To choose the most gender-neutral name, one has to know what names are out there, when they were being used, and how their use is distributed. Truly, parents don’t really know the gender of their child at birth (and let’s not even get into sex), but assignments are often made, and names are chosen and registered... and in this database, only “male” and “female” categories were available.

From a list of baby names registered in England and Wales from 1996 to 2000, I was able to pull together the graph below (see the top picture for high-res). The x-axis (horizontal) is the number of male-designated babies who were registered, and the y-axis (vertical) is the number of female-designated babies who were registered. The black diagonal line (x=y) shows where the number of female and male babies are equal. So, if 100 female babies were given the name “Lee” and 100 male babies were given the name “Lee” during this time frame, the name “Lee” would appear directly over the black line. The color of the name indicates how many total babies (of any designation) were given the name.

Jordan is by far the most common name over all, although Ashleigh and Courtney were given to more female-designated babies (though, note that Ashley is overlapping Tyler on the male-biased side). The names that are optimally the most “neutral” and popular seem to by Morgan (about 1403 per year) and Taylor (909). Cody (174) and Devon (164) are also very neutral, but they are much rarer. Rio (114) and Mackenzie (122) are neutral as well, but they are super-rare because they aren’t attested ever year. The less common a name is, the less likely someone is to have met people of any gender who have that name. If you’ve only ever met a Jamie who is a girl, you might think it’s a girl’s name, even though it’s pretty far to the right in the “male-biased” space.

So if you have to write an example sentence and you want to choose a name that doesn’t evoke any particular gender, I’d recommend choosing Taylor or Morgan, which are optimally balanced and common.

są é tą’m löi-őt-sį

[sɑ̃ ɛː ˈtɑ̃m lʌi̯ ʌːt ˈsĩ]

są é tą =m löi -őt -sį

lobster and fish =S mock -RECP -HAB.V

“the lobster and fish regularly mock each other”