This textbook is intended as a means for the development of textual competence in second-language students at the upper intermediate and advanced levels when approaching literary texts, especially narrative ones. By means of a linguistic tool such as structures of modification—words, phrases, clauses, and even sentences functioning as modifiers—it explores actions and descriptions in the narrative process as seen in the short story. Modification, as the late Francis Christensen showed, generates meaning in creative writing. With these ideas and aims in mind, the book has been structured in five chapters including (1) a review of the English sentence, (2) the expansion of the sentence by coordination, (3) the expansion of the sentence by modification, (4) structures of modification of nouns and verbs and (5) the shaping of the image proposed by the verb and the noun, in other words actions and descriptions.