The construction of effective sentence …

… as suggested by Jacques Barzun: The American Scholar: Endless Rewriting - Helen Hazen. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

During my first attempts, faintheartedness crept in. I would pore over my letter from Mr. Barzun like a lovesick teenager, my face flushing as I read that my prose was suffused with a “delicate mixture of wit and humor” and that he wanted to see more of my writing on any subject. That got me through part of a first draft. Looking back over the early attempts that I sent off, I squirm with embarrassment. Some of it I cannot read at all: it was just horrible. Since I didn’t know how to think, I told stories, stories that in my mind proved my point, that women loved men. And then I commented on the stories, explaining that, well, women loved men.