Arts Fuse Stanley Fish Think Again
How To Write A Sentence: And How To Read One
By Stanley Fish
Hardcover, 176 pages
Harper
List toll: $19.99
Why Sentences ?
In her volume The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow author who was asked by a student, "Practice you think I could be a writer?" " 'Well,' the writer said, 'do y'all like sentences?' " The student is surprised by the question, only Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he liked sentences he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the olfactory property of paint.' " The point, made implicitly (Dillard does non belabor it), is that yous don't brainstorm with a chiliad formulation, either of the nifty American novel or a masterpiece that volition hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty fabric of the medium, paint in ane case, sentences in the other.
Only wouldn't the equivalent of paint exist words rather than sentences? Actually, no, because while yous tin can brush or fifty-fifty drip paint on a canvas and make something interesting happen, merely piling up words, i after the other, won't practice much of anything until something else has been added. That something is named quite precisely past Anthony Burgess in this sentence from his novel Enderby Outside (1968):
And the words slide into the slots ordained past syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which nosotros telephone call meaning.
Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere. Once the words are nestled in the places "ordained" for them — "ordained" is a wonderful word that points to the inexorable logic of syntactic structures — they are tied by ligatures of relationships to one another. They are subjects or objects or deportment or descriptives or indications of way, and every bit such they combine into a statement about the world, that is, into a pregnant that i can contemplate, admire, pass up, or refine. Virginia Tufte, whose book Aesthetic Sentences (2006) begins with this sentence of Burgess'due south, comments: "It is syntax that gives the words the ability to relate to each other in a sequence ... to acquit meaning — of whatever kind — as well as glow individually in simply the right place." Flaubert'due south famous search for the "mot juste" was not a search for words that glow solitary, but for words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time. Hither is Dillard again: "When you write you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner'southward selection, a woodcarver'due south gouge, a surgeon'southward probe. You wield it and it digs a path y'all follow." And when you lot come to the end of the path, you have a sentence. Flaubert described himself in a letter of the alphabet as beingness in a semi-diseased state, "itching with sentences." He just had to get them out. He would declaim them to passersby.
I wish I had been one of them. Some people are bird watchers, others are celebrity watchers; all the same others are flora and beast watchers. I belong to the tribe of sentence watchers. Some appreciate art; others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences. I am always on the sentinel for sentences that accept your jiff away, for sentences that make you say, "Isn't that something?" or "What a sentence!" Some of my fellow sentence appreciators have websites: Best Sentences Ever, Sentences We Love, Best First Sentences, Best Concluding Sentences. Invariably the sentences that turn upwards on these sites are non chosen for the substantive political or social or philosophical points they make. They are chosen considering they are performances of a certain skill at the highest level. The closest analogy, I think, is to sports highlights; you know, the five greatest dunks, or the ten greatest catches, or the xv greatest touchdown runbacks. The response is always, "Wasn't that amazing?" or "Tin can you lot believe information technology?" or "I can't for the life of me see how he did that," or "What an incredible move!" or "That's non humanly possible." And always the adoration is a rueful recognition that you couldn't do it yourself fifty-fifty though you also have 2 easily and feet. Information technology is the aforementioned with sentences that do things the language y'all use every day would non accept seemed capable of doing. We marvel at them; we read them aloud to our friends and spouses, even, occasionally, to passersby; we clarify them; we lament our inability to match them.
One squeamish affair nearly sentences that display a skill you tin can merely green-eyed is that they tin can be found anywhere, even when yous're non looking for them. I was driving dwelling listening to NPR and heard a commentator recount a story about the legendary extra Joan Crawford. It seems that she never left the house without beingness dressed as if she were going to a premiere or a dinner at Sardi'due south. An interviewer asked her why. She replied, "If yous want to see the daughter next door, go next door." Information technology is hardly surprising that Joan Crawford had thought nigh the importance to fans of flick stars behaving like film stars (since her time, there has been a bounding main change; now, courtesy of paparazzi, we see film stars picking up their laundry in Greenwich Village or Brentwood); what may be surprising is that she could convey her insight in a sentence i could relish. Information technology is the bang-bang swiftness of the brusque imperative clause — "go next door" — that does the piece of work by taking the commonplace phrase "the girl adjacent door" literally and reminding u.s.a. that "adjacent door" is a real place where one should not expect to detect glamour (unless of class one is watching Judy Garland singing "The Boy Side by side Door" in Meet Me in St. Louis).
A adept sentence tin can plow up in the middle of a movie where information technology shines for an instant and and then recedes equally the plot advances. At one point in The Magnificent Seven (1960), the bandit leader, played by Eli Wallach, explains why he isn't bothered much by the hardships suffered by the peasant-farmers whose food and supplies he plunders:
If God didn't want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep.
The sentence is snapped off, almost like the flick of a whip; it has the form of proverbial wisdom (a form we shall expect at later on), and the air of finality and certainty it aspires to is clinched past the parallelism of clauses that too feature the patterned repetition of consonants and vowels: "didn't want" and "would non have," "sheared" and "sheep." We know that "sheep" is coming because of "sheared" and when it arrives it seems inevitable and, at least from ane perspective, just. Swell for a bandit. Fifty-fifty children tin produce a skilful sentence. My mother-in-law, Lucille Reilly Parry, was a class-school teacher and she recalled a twenty-four hours when a large box was delivered to the school. No one knew where it had come from or what it was, and she gave her fourth-grade students the consignment of writing something well-nigh it. 1 student began her essay with this sentence:
I was already on the second floor when I heard most the box.
What is noteworthy about this sentence is its ability to draw readers in and make them want more. Information technology is a question of what we know and don't know. We know that the author was in the middle of something ("I was already") but we don't know what; neither practice we know how she learned about the box or what outcome (if whatsoever) the fact of it had on what she was in the course of doing. And so nosotros read on in the expectation of finding out. Many practiced writers would kill for a first sentence that good.
I found another of my favorite sentences while instruction the last large school-prayer example, Lee v. Weisman (1992). Mr. Weisman brought a cause of action against Nathan Bishop Eye Schoolhouse in Providence, Rhode Island (the same school I attended many decades ago), because a thoroughly secular prayer had been read at his daughter'south graduation. Weisman regarded the prayer as a alienation of the First Amendment'south prohibition against the state'southward establishing of a religion. A majority of the Supreme Court justices agreed with him and reasoned that even though the prayer had no sectarian content and fabricated no demands on the students, who were free to ignore information technology, its very rehearsal was an act of "psychological coercion." This was besides much for Justice Scalia, who, after citing a young man jurist's complaint that establishment clause jurisprudence was becoming and so byzantine that it was in danger of becoming a form of interior decorating, got off this zinger:
Interior decorating is a stone-hard science compared to psychology proficient by amateurs.
The sentence is itself a rock thrown at Scalia's young man justices in the majority; information technology is a projectile that picks up speed with every word; the acceleration is an effect of the ii past participles "compared" and "practiced"; their economic system does not allow a break or a taking of a breath, and the sentence hurtles toward what is both its semantic and real-life destination: the "amateurs" who are sitting next to Scalia as he spits it out.
The pleasance I take in the sentence has nothing to do with the instance or with the merits of either the majority's or the dissent's arguments. It is the pleasure of affectionate a technical achievement — hither the athletic illustration might exist to target shooting — in this case, Scalia'due south ability to load, aim, and go off a shot before his victims knew what was happening. I conduct that sentence around with me as others might carry a precious jewel or a fine Swiss picket. I pull it out and look at it. I pull it out and invite others (who are sometimes reluctant) to wait at it. I put it under a microscope and examine its innermost workings.
Excerpted from How To Write A Sentence past Stanley Fish. Copyright 2011 by Stanley Fish. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2011/01/25/133214521/stanley-fish-demystifies-how-to-write-a-sentence
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