If you have read our Introduction to Sentence Combining, you're now ready to try combining sentences to form a complete paragraph.
What follows are the opening two paragraphs of the essay "New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed," by Gay Talese (first published in 1960 and recently collected in The Gay Talese Reader, Walker, 2003). Read these paragraphs to get a sense of the author's subject and style. Then complete the exercise, which consists of 23 sentences arranged in seven sets.
Be guided by the sets (the sentences in each may be combined into a single sentence), but don't be restricted by them. Feel free to combine the sets or to make two or more sentences out of one set. You may rearrange the sentences in any fashion that seems suitable. After you have completed this sentence-combining exercise, compare your paragraph with the sample combinations on page two.
from "New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed"
by Gay Talese
New York is a city of things unnoticed. It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars, two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patrick's Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on top of the Empire State Building. The ants probably were carried up there by wind or birds, but nobody is sure; nobody in New York knows any more about the ants than they do about the panhandler who takes taxis to the Bowery; or the dapper man who picks trash out of Sixth Avenue trash cans; or the medium in the West Seventies who claims, "I am clairvoyant, clairaudient, and clairsensuous."
New York is a city for eccentrics and a center for odd bits of information. New Yorkers blink twenty-eight times a minute, but forty when tense. Most popcorn chewers at Yankee Stadium stop chewing momentarily just before the pitch. Gum chewers on Macy's escalators stop chewing momentarily just before they get off--to concentrate on the last step. Coins, paper clips, ballpoint pens, and little girls' pocketbooks are found by workmen when they clean the sea lions' pool at the Bronx Zoo.
- A saxophone player stands on the sidewalk.
He stands there each afternoon.
He is in New York.
He is rather seedy.
He plays Danny Boy.
- He plays in a sad way.
He plays in a sensitive way.
He soon has half the neighborhood peeking out of windows.
They toss nickels, dimes, and quarters at his feet.
- Some of the coins roll under parked cars.
Most of them are caught in his hand.
His hand is outstretched.
- The saxophone player is a street musician.
He is named Joe Gabler.
- He has serenaded every block in New York City.
He has been serenading for the past thirty years.
He has sometimes been tossed as much as $100 a day.
This $100 is in coins.
- He is also hit with buckets of water.
He is hit with beer cans.
The cans are empty.
He is chased by wild dogs.
- He is believed to be the last of New York's ancient street musicians.*
*Notice that the seventh set contains just one sentence. Because most paragraphs are made up of both long and short sentences, you will sometimes find one-sentence sets in the exercises. You have the choice of either copying these sentences just as they are or combining them with the sentences in another set.
After you have completed this sentence-combining exercise, compare your paragraph with the sample combinations on page two.
