Steadman despises other writers for their "clumsy sentences and upholstered paragraphs".
"Are you ready for English?" he yelled, and the crowd roared as he spoke a few clumsy sentences in the tongue of the superpower, which, in Ivory Coast, is the language of youthful resistance.
There are in The Sentinel, not surprisingly, a wobbliness of structure, some clumsy sentences, a good deal of overwriting - and many acute observations and marvellous phrases which presage the writer she would become.
"Do I have to be in a book with such a clumsy opening sentence?" asked Harriett, Charlotte's petite precocious 10-year-old daughter with the brown bob who bore absolutely no resemblance to the author.
This way, you'll notice clumsy repetitions, nonsensical sentences, accidental rhyming or a phrase that's difficult to get your tongue round, and you'll get a sense of whether or not your dialogue sounds convincing.
Rather, it is the short sentences that can be clumsy.
Clarke seemed to emerge from the programme quite well, winning the qualified support of other panellists and members of the audience, while apologising again for his clumsy explanation of his position on sentencing.
Information that has been established gets repeated, and the book's sentences are occasionally so clumsy that a reader can't visualize the action before being asked to picture its opposite: "A flash of plain fear was going out of [Atticus's] eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light".
Now Mr. Jiang, who immigrated from China at 16, sits in custody awaiting sentencing, an audacious if ultimately clumsy predator in the immeasurable world of cybercrime.
