Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Great Sentences are Rare Birds with Exotic Plumage.

This month I review How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One (HarperCollins)by Stanley Fish. While I have qualms about Mr. Fish's overarching argument, this book can be for lovers of good-to-great writing what a bird-watching guide can be for bird lovers, a compendium and an appreciation of great sentences in the wild, in all their varied splendor.

Unfortunately, the book's flaws show up in its opening pages when the professor of humanities and law at Florida International University makes the case that, when it comes to writing great sentences, content is irrelevant. The most important issue is form.

Professor Fish might as well be arguing that the sentence is the essential building block of life on our planet, also on Mars and the moons of Saturn. While I believe sentences are important, and while I admire some sentences every bit as much as Fish, I disagree with him over the issue of content. Content is not only relevant, it's the determining factor.

As Fish finally admits on page 35 of his book, "Content, the communication in a thrilling and effective way of ideas and passions, is finally what sentences are for." A page later, he hones in on what's painfully obvious to many: "Sentences are meaningless without context."

Fish states that the worth of a sentence is the degree to which it achieves its desired effect. That is why the prescriptive advice found in books like Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is useful only in relation to some purpose. The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is "What am I trying to communicate? What is my purpose in writing?"

Yes, I agree; only I would go further: Writing is about creating a meaningful, seamless, well-formed argument or involving story that, in a way, "chooses" its own rhetorical and writing rules so as to deliver most effectively the content one wishes to express.

Once a writer knows her purpose and the larger context of a piece, she can figure out the best way to express it in a seamless, convincing, and appealing way. It's all about content.

In my opinion, when Stanley Fish writes about the beauty of certain sentences in his opening chapter, "What is a good sentence?" and when he writes movingly about great opening sentences (in chapter eight) and great closing sentences (in chapter nine) he supplies the context because he knows those works.

That's my only criticism. In fact,I love this book for its willingness to quote authors and their sentences voraciously, everyone from Romans like Cato and Cicero to Milton, Jonathan Swift, D.H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth, Elmore Leonard, and so many more.

Just a few examples Fish mentions in his "First Sentences" chapter:

"In the afternoons, it was the custom of Miss Jane Marple to unfold her second newspaper." (Agatha Christie)

"One day Karen DeCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca." (Elmore Leonard)

"The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses." (Philip Roth)

And from his "Last Sentences" chapter:

"It is a far, far better thing that I do then I have ever done before; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, then I have ever known." (Dickens)

"In my case, an accident of birth, but you, sir, you're a self-made man." (What Ralph Bellamy's character calls Lee Marvin's character a bastard in the movie, "The Professionals" (1966).

"He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance." (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.)

And arguably the most famous last line of all:

"So we beat on, oars against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

More than just a collection of great sentences, I found the author's discussion of them to be uniformly smart and well informed. It is by far the most valuable feature of the book.

I recommend it as a guide to great sentences.

While it may not teach you how to write a sentence as the title claims, it will help you to spot and appreciate the great and colorful ones when they fly by.

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