How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One
By Stanley Fish
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. Stanley Fish appreciates fine sentences. The New York Times columnist and world-class professor has long been an aficionado of language. Like a seasoned sportscaster, Fish marvels at the adeptness of finely crafted sentences and breaks them down into digestible morsels, giving readers an instant play-by-play.
In this entertaining and erudite gem, Fish offers both sentence craft and sentence pleasure, skills invaluable to any writer (or reader). How to Write a Sentence is both a spirited love letter to the written word and a key to understanding how great writing works; it is a book that will stand the test of time.
“Both deeper and more democratic than The Elements of Style” —Adam Haslett, Financial Times
“A guided tour through some of the most beautiful, arresting sentences in the English language.” —Slate
Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish is a professor of law at Florida International University in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University. He is the author of fourteen books, most recently Fugitive in Flight and Save the World on Your Own Time. He lives in Andes, New York, and New York City.
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Reviews for How to Write a Sentence
115 ratings14 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fish is an expert, but I can't recall, after a few years, anything from this book.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The half of this book that's about "How to Write a Sentence" is super good. The half of it that's about "How to Read One" is abysmal.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5My reading year began with Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. Adler mentions (p. xi) that after the book became a best-seller, it was parodied by How to Read Two Books and, more seriously, How to Read a Page. So when I saw How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, I was intrigued. With my usual marginalia noticeably absent, I must say the book was worth reading, but it is relatively easy enough to take in in one go. The book provides numerous examples of great sentences, including great beginning and ending sentences. (Dickens doesn't get a mention other than a suggestion that his were over-rated.) There are a number of exercises using various sentence types that are useful. Hemingway thought that if he could write just one good sentence, then the day was well-spent (A Moveable Feast, p. 22):I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.Fish doesn't go so far, but sees the sentence as a building block for all great writing. I particularly liked the idea that to be a writer, one has to like sentences, much like the painter who paints because she likes the smell of paint (p. 1). And the poem by Kenneth Koch really sums up this delightful little book:
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.The next day the Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
I would say that the major benefit of reading this work is that it brings the sentence back as the unit of work. I tend to focus more on paragraphs as corralled ideas, but overlook the importance of the humble sentence. Having read this work, I hope I can implement some of the clever suggestions and see the role of the humble sentence in framing not just stories, but also my academic work. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An unapologetic potboiler, and probably not of very much practical use as a self-help book. But enjoyable enough as a virtuoso display of off-the-cuff textual criticism without a safety net of technical jargon.Fish argues that we should see a sentence as a structure of logical semantic relationships between things rather than as a grammatical entity, an idea that he demonstrates in practice by taking a selection of famous and not-so-famous sentences from Great Writers and explaining how they convey meaning. Of course, Fish has been filleting the giants of Eng Lit for a living for half a century and is pretty good at it by now, so this is extremely well worth watching. Milton features heavily, as you would expect, but there's also a lot of Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford, and the occasional venture into contemporaries like Philip Roth. Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf get a look in too. To his credit, Fish manages to hop across genres and centuries with remarkably little fuss: most of his examples need only a couple of lines of context to guide the reader along, and he manages almost entirely without resorting to the sort of technical terms that might scare beginners away. Fish isn't a Joseph Conrad or a Milton himself, of course: he's a university professor who has a lot of experience writing newspaper columns, so the text is fluent and presentable, but it doesn't pretend to be an example of what it is analysing. The hypothetical self-helper who is following along with pen and paper is encouraged to try making up variants on these formulae ("It is a far, far, duller thing that I write now than I have ever written..."), but even Fish doesn't really seem to believe that this is going to happen. He mentions that it was his publisher who proposed the title of the book, and his wife the subtitle: that figures. As a "How to write..." book, I'm sure this must sell better than if it were marketed as a beginner's guide to close-reading of English prose, which is what it really is.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I loved this exploration of the potential, power, and beauty that can be contained in one sentence. I highly recommend this to readers and writers.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fish is the same obnoxious, pompous ass intellectual he's always been but he does have some interesting and entertaining things to say about the appreciation and craft of writing in this book.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I hesitate to write this review. As I read Fish's book on sentences, I constantly analyzed how he constructed his own. Now I'm writing my review, conscious that my sentences have a long way to go before even approaching greatness.Fish is a connoisseur of sentences. He's unapologetic about it:"Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences. I am always on the lookout for sentences that take your breath away, for sentences that make you say, "Isn't that something?" or "What a sentence" (3)!His sentence collection, developed over the years, is the great strength of this book. Fish uses examples from Annie Dillard to Lewis Carroll, from John Donne to Edgar Allan Poe to illustrate his points. He isn't so enamored with a particular style of writing that he cannot appreciate and enjoy the English language in all its forms.The strongest thing I learned from How to Write a Sentence was the difference between the "subordinating style," where every sub-clause is neatly and logically tucked into place and the "additive style", where clauses ramble on to paint a mood more than argue a point.If there's a weakness in this book it's the overall feeling of pretentiousness that surfaces. The tone of his writing felt almost condescending at times. Rather than hearing the excitement of someone itching to share his sentence collection to his friends, you read the wizened teacher encouraging his students to practice, so that one day, they too will be able to write well.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ostensibly, this is a book about how to craft an effective sentence. But it is also a celebration of those who have done it really well. Much of the book consists of examples by writers who perfected the art of constructing sentences, and by so doing helped us to perceive reality more beautifully, or ironically, or succinctly, or evocatively, than we ever would have been able to do on our own.Through numerous examples, Professor Fish demonstrates the elements of good writing: What characteristics of sentences make us want to know more of the story? How do we write such sentences? How can we combine words to reflect a certain perspective, advance a point of view, or convey a particular emotion?To my mind, the best example in the book is provided by an extensive quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter From A Birmingham Jail (1963). In a famous passage, the late Dr. King explained why blacks had run out of patience waiting for civil rights. He anguished over the impossibility of explaining to a six-year-old child why the world, for blacks, was like it was, and he lamented seeing “the depressing clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky….” In this short and incredibly masterful phrase, Dr. King packed in years of history; textured it with analysis; and freighted it with emotion. One can appreciate how and why he moved so many. Evaluation: Fish’s essay provides a lovely, short explication and appreciation of good writing, both for those who want to be counted among adept wordsmiths, and for those simply interested in appreciating the prowess of others.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A beautiful little book. I really fell in love with his dissection of great sentences. I thought I liked each sentence, but I had to admit, after his analysis, I saw them in a whole new light.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Simply delightful. Stanley Fish appreciates “sentences that take your breath away.” His enthusiasm is infectious, fuelled by examples drawn from great literature. He makes you want to read each of those works (and countless others) slowly, so that you can savour every last sentence.This is not a manual of style or correct usage; comparisons with Strunk and White are misplaced. There are a few simple exercises suggested, but what Fish is aiming at is not pedagogy, and certainly not pedantry. It is, rather, I think, a genuine wish to encourage readers (and writers) to refocus on the very stuff that makes great literature great: sentences.What are sentences? They are basic building blocks of meaning, an organization of items in the world, a structure of logical relationships. It sounds a bit like the early Wittgenstein re-heated by J.L. Austin. It’s not. Stanley Fish is an unapologetic child of the New Criticism. His formula – Sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation – is nothing less than a justification for steeping oneself in the finest sentences that the history of literature can provide. Which is precisely what he does.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5While the sections on parataxis and hypotaxis (additive and subordinating style respectively) are worth the price of admission, the title is deceptive since Fish is less interested in helping you write better sentences than he is in analyzing those he likes. So the subtile would be more accurate. Nonetheless he is passionate and its infectious and he is a connoisseur . Still readers will be better served checking out Francine Prose's How to Read as a Writer and Virginia Tufte's marvelous Artful Sentences remains the definitive work on sentence components.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stanley Fish presents the readers with a variety of sentences and an analysis of their content. In each case, he discusses word choice, meanings conveyed, flow, and probably some stuff I’ve forgotten. His intent is to enable the reader to understand the value in the sentences, recognize different structural forms, and, if not to write better sentences, then to appreciate a well-written sentence.The book has three sections. The first presents key sentences, and he analyzes their form. Then provides new sentences using the same to show their presentation forms and what they convey.The second portion discusses first and last sentences. It discusses how first sentences set the stage for the rest of the story, and how last sentences create (sometimes) closure.The last section lost me a bit. Supposedly it discusses self-referential sentences, but maybe I didn’t quite get it.Stanley makes very good use of examples from famous pieces of literature. It is an easy read with good information.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Now here is a review I'll have to edit carefully. Like a well composed sentence of which he would approve, Stanley Fish's "How to Write a Sentence and How to Read one" has a clear formal structure, and cleaves closely to it. But, also like one of Fish's preferred sentences, it nevertheless rambles on in an unchaperoned fashion: for a short book, it is easy to put down. For all its tight formal structure, it is not clear what Fish wants to achieve, if not simply to put the world to rights. Early on, Fish dismisses Strunk & White's classic The Elements of Style and of the sort of economical writing that volume encourages. He claims Strunk & White is only of any use to those who already know not just how to write, but what devilishly complicated things like adjectives and independent clauses are. But hold on: Are the parts of speech really that intimidating? Certainly no more intimidating than Fish's own vocabulary: to avoid them, Fish suggests the reader practice identifying the logiical relationships that constitute (or are constituted by) sentences by picking four or five items from around the room and joining them with "a verb or a modal auxiliary"! The irony runs on: The back half of the book extols sentences, itself in sentences, that no-one without a passion for a well-placed subjunctive would have a hope of comprehending. All the same this is no technical manual. In his first half Fish airily proposes some formal sentence structures types and counsels the reader to practise them. There are just three, and they seem arbitrary: the "subordinating style", where descriptive clauses refine and further describe an initial proposition (often sentences with "which" or "that" in them - "the bed that you make is the one you have to lie in"); the "additive style", where each additional clause augments the content to preceding ones (so, "the fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, the furrow followed free"); and the "satyric" style, which doesn't seem to be a formal sentence structure at all, but Fish's own prescription for being witty. I'm not sure why these would be the fundaments of any linguistic structure, other than because Fish says so, nor what to do about sentences, like this one, that attempt to do all three. Nor that there aren't perfectly well sentences that do none. (Most of James Ellroy's never get that far, for example). Talk of James Ellroy reminds me: what Fish's prescription, contra Strunk, White and Ellroy's (now There would be a fine book on style!) encourages verbosity. Fish loves long, wordy, flowery writing: he's a lawyer, after all. He devotes he second half of his book to a canter through his favourite sentences from literature. Most, to my eyes, could have been improved with a full stop or two and hearty use of a red pen, and all seemed selected as much to burnish the author's own intellectual credentials as anything else. Fish believes that Strunk & White's preference for concision is a modern error that robs the language of richness and diversity. Now, granted, I don't always practice what I preach, but I profoundly disagree: It is easy (as Fish demonstrates, using his subordinate and additive templates) to write infinitely long sentences. All you need is to be bothered enough to do so. It is harder to write short ones. It is much harder to write good short ones. Elongating a sentence for the sake of it is a charlatan's ruse. It appeals only to the pretentious and those who charge by the hour, as lawyers do. The real challenge, as far as I can see, is importing all that richness and complexity as economically as possible. Thus I can't recommend this book based on its billing. If you do want to learn, simply, how to write and read a sentence, then - well, try Strunk & White. If you like the idiosyncratic peregrinations of a bon vivant law and literature professor, perhaps this is your book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stanley Fish argues that sentences rather than words are the material that writers work with. Piles of words mean nothing until they slide into their ordained places, until they relate to each other in particular and logical ways, until they combine with other words to make meaning. If we want to write well and clearly then he insists we must focus on forms. Fortunately for most younger Australians he doesn't mean old fashioned grammatical forms but a logical sequence of linkages between actor, action and the object of the action.He gives some wonderful examples from the greats of what he calls the subordinating style, the additive style and the satiric style and encourages us to copy them by substituting words that perform the same function within a sentence. His comments on the function and importance of first and final sentences cut straight to the marrow and made me reconsider the economy and efficiency of my leading sentences.In the final pages he turns his attention to the actual content of sentences - and this is where he comes unstuck. In the earlier chapters he uses modern and contemporary examples. The last chapter dwells on examples from centuries well past, alluding to ancient and biblical knowledge and using archaic language that many readers might struggle with.Although I read the early chapters hungrily I became bogged down towards the end and found it difficult to finish. However I have added to my armoury of knowledge about writing and now have a better understanding of how words function within sentences without having to revise all the grammatical jargon of my school days.
Book preview
How to Write a Sentence - Stanley Fish
CHAPTER 1
Why Sentences?
In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, Do you think I could be a writer?
‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘do you like sentences?’
The student is surprised by the question, but 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 smell of paint.’
The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabor it), is that you don’t begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or a masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.
But wouldn’t the equivalent of paint be words rather than sentences? Actually, no, because while you can brush or even drip paint on a canvas and make something interesting happen, just piling up words, one after the other, won’t do much of anything until something else has been added. That something is named quite precisely by Anthony Burgess in this sentence from his novel Enderby Outside (1968):
And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we 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 actions or descriptives or indications of manner, and as such they combine into a statement about the world, that is, into a meaning that one can contemplate, admire, reject, or refine. Virginia Tufte, whose book Artful Sentences (2006) begins with this sentence of Burgess’s, comments: It is syntax that gives the words the power to relate to each other in a sequence . . . to carry meaning—of whatever kind—as well as glow individually in just the right place.
Flaubert’s famous search for the mot juste
was not a search for words that glow alone, but for words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time. Here is Dillard again: When you write you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it and it digs a path you follow.
And when you come to the end of the path, you have a sentence. Flaubert described himself in a letter as being 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; still others are flora and fauna watchers. I belong to the tribe of sentence watchers. Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences. I am always on the lookout for sentences that take your breath 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 Last Sentences. Invariably the sentences that turn up on these sites are not chosen for the substantive political or social or philosophical points they make. They are chosen because 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 fifteen greatest touchdown runbacks. The response is always, Wasn’t that amazing?
or Can you believe it?
or I can’t for the life of me see how he did that,
or What an incredible move!
or That’s not humanly possible.
And always the admiration is a rueful recognition that you couldn’t do it yourself even though you also have two hands and feet. It is the same with sentences that do things the language you use every day would not have seemed capable of doing. We marvel at them; we read them aloud to our friends and spouses, even, occasionally, to passersby; we analyze them; we lament our inability to match them.
One nice thing about sentences that display a skill you can only envy is that they can be found anywhere, even when you’re not looking for them. I was driving home listening to NPR and heard a commentator recount a story about the legendary actress Joan Crawford. It seems that she never left the house without being dressed as if she were going to a premiere or a dinner at Sardi’s. An interviewer asked her why. She replied, If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.
It is hardly surprising that Joan Crawford had thought about the importance to fans of movie stars behaving like movie stars (since her time, there has been a sea change; now, courtesy of paparazzi, we see movie stars picking up their laundry in Greenwich Village or Brentwood); what may be surprising is that she could convey her insight in a sentence one could savor. It is the bang-bang swiftness of the short imperative clause—go next door
—that does the work by taking the commonplace phrase the girl next door
literally and reminding us that next door
is a real place where one should not expect to find glamour (unless of course one is watching Judy Garland singing The Boy Next Door
in Meet Me in St. Louis).
A good sentence can turn up in the middle of a movie where it shines for an instant and then recedes as 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 look at later), and the air of finality and certainty it aspires to is clinched by the parallelism of clauses that also feature the patterned repetition of consonants and vowels: didn’t want
and would not have,
sheared
and sheep.
We know that sheep
is coming because of sheared
and when it arrives it seems inevitable and, at least from one perspective, just. Not bad for a bandit.
Even children can produce a good sentence. My mother-in-law, Lucille Reilly Parry, was a grade-school teacher and she recalled a day 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 assignment of writing something about it. One student began her essay with this sentence:
I was already on the second floor when I heard about the box.
What is noteworthy about this sentence is its ability to draw readers in and make them want more. It is a question of what we know and don’t know. We know that the writer was in the middle of something (I was already
) but we don’t know what; neither do we know how she learned about the box or what effect (if any) the fact of it had on what she was in the course of doing. And so we 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 teaching the last big school-prayer case, Lee v. Weisman (1992). Mr. Weisman brought a cause of action against Nathan Bishop Middle School in Providence, Rhode Island (the same school I attended many decades ago), because a thoroughly secular prayer had been read at his daughter’s graduation. Weisman regarded the prayer as a breach of the First Amendment’s prohibition against the state’s 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 made no demands on the students, who were free to ignore it, its very rehearsal was an act of psychological coercion.
This was too much for Justice Scalia, who, after citing a fellow jurist’s complaint that establishment clause jurisprudence was becoming so byzantine that it was in danger of becoming a form of interior decorating, got off this zinger:
Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.
The sentence is itself a rock thrown at Scalia’s fellow justices in the majority; it is a projectile that picks up speed with every word; the acceleration is an effect of the two past participles compared
and practiced
; their economy does not allow a pause 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 pleasure I take in the sentence has nothing to do with the case or with the merits of either the majority’s or the dissent’s arguments. It is the pleasure of appreciating a technical achievement—here the athletic analogy might be to target shooting—in this case, Scalia’s ability to load, aim, and get off a shot before his victims knew what was happening. I carry that sentence around with me as others might carry a precious gem or a fine Swiss watch. I pull it out and look at it. I pull it out and invite others (who are sometimes reluctant) to look at it. I put it under a microscope and examine its innermost workings.
That sounds, I know, rather precious, as if sentences were one-off
performances, discrete instances of what Walter Pater sought in art, experiences of brilliant intensity that promise nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass and simply for those moments’ sake
(quite a sentence itself, and we shall return to Pater). But, in fact, sentences promise more. They promise nothing less than lessons and practice in the organization of the world. That is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated. If you can write a sentence in which actors, actions, and objects are related to one another in time, space, mood, desires, fears, causes, and effects, and if your specification of those relationships is delineated with a precision that communicates itself to your intended reader, you can, by extrapolation and expansion, write anything: a paragraph, an argument, an essay, a treatise, a novel. There is nothing in discourse,
Roland Barthes once said, that is not to be found in a sentence
(Image Music Text, 1977). A discourse of any size, he added, is a long sentence . . . just as a sentence is a short discourse.
Years ago, when I was in the beginning stages of mapping out a book, my department chair, Hugh Kenner, gave me this advice: Just get the first sentence right, everything else will follow.
He meant that if my first sentence were written with a full comprehension of the twists and turns in the journey it introduced (which would make it in effect the last sentence), following its lead would guide me to the right order of my arguments and examples. He was right.
A sentence is, in John Donne’s words, a little world made cunningly.
(Donne is speaking of the human body, but that is just another composition.) I want to bring you into the little worlds made cunningly by as many writers as I can cram into a short book. My motives are at once aesthetic and practical. I hope that you will come to share the delight and awe I feel when reading and contemplating these sentences, and I hope that by the time you finish you will be able to write some fine, if not great, sentences yourself. So I promise to give you both sentence pleasure and sentence craft, the ability to appreciate a good sentence and the ability to fashion one. These skills are sometimes thought of as having only an oblique relationship to one another, but they are, I believe, acquired in tandem. If you learn what it is that goes into the making of a memorable sentence—what skills of coordination, subordination, allusion, compression, parallelism, alliteration (all terms to be explained later) are in play—you will also be learning how to take the appreciative measure of such sentences. And conversely, if you can