In his new book How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, Stanley Fish says sentences, not words, are the basic building blocks in writing.
A sentence is a group of words with clear relationships to one another, arranged in one of a finite number of recognizable frames, he says. Without those clear relationships and frames, words have no meaning beyond their dictionary definitions.
John Updike's Most Famous Sentence
Fish says he loves sentences so much, he collects particularly good and particularly bad ones. Some of the most entertaining parts of the book are when he discusses them.
One of his all-time favorites comes from John Updike's "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," originally published in The New Yorker magazine in 1960. It's Updike's widely reprinted account of the final game of Ted Williams's career. In the last at-bat of his life, Williams hit a long home run to right-centerfield in Fenway Park.
Updike writes:
It was in the books while it was still in the air.
Fish urges writers to collect great sentences and analyze what makes them great . His analysis of Updike's 12-word sentence runs two pages . It's like analyzing why a joke is funny. It's of no interest except to an aspiring craftsman. A writer might find it interesting and helpful.
The "fulcrum" of the sentence is while, Fish says. It sets up a chronological connection between a metaphor and an event that really happened in time and space. It also equates a metaphor and a real event. Whether we think about it consciously or not, creating those relationships between a metaphor and event is surprising and highly original, the work of a master craftsman.
A baseball in the air is something everyone can picture. Updike wants us to take that half of the sentence literally. But in the books means the baseball record books, the history books, and the extensive folklore of baseball and Ted Williams. No one should try to imitate that sentence, but understanding why it works can unconsciously enlarge a writer's toolbox and enhance his taste, Fish says.
The Elements of Style
The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White (commonly called "Strunk and White") is considered by many writers and writing teachers to be the best book about writing ever written. But it is only helpful to people who already know how to write, Fish says. It requires too much previous knowledge.
"Strunk and White" says, "Do not join independent clauses with commas." That's good advice if you know what an independent clause is.
Like most books about writing, and most efforts to teach the basics, "Strunk and White" uses the technical language of writing to talk about writing. What use is it to tell someone who does not know what a subject and predicate are that a sentence is a "subject and a predicate?" What use is it to identify the eight parts of speech without understanding how to make the connections between them clear, and arrange them in frames the reader can recognize and understand?
Fish tries to explain writing basics without the language (jargon) of writing.
Syntax Without Jargon
Syntax is the way we arrange words in sentences. There is an infinite number of clear sentences, but a finite number of recognizable syntactic frames. Fish describes most of them without the jargon many English teachers use. One of the most pointless things we make writing students do is memorize the correct names for the most basic sentence frameworks: simple, compound, complex, compound-complex, relative, states of being. These terms are vague and hard to remember because they do not create a mental picture of what they are
Fish says sentences are either "subordinating" or "additive." Subordinating sentences show relationships of time, cause-and-effect, and orders of importance. The writer's planning is in plain view. Additive sentences try to appear spontaneous, haphazard, and artless. Good additive writing is none of the above, but it serves the writer's purpose to appear as if it is.
These two chapters are loaded with Fish's favorite sentences that illustrate each point he makes.
The Simplest Frames
One of the most basic sentence frames, in Fish's words, is "Who or what did it; what he did; and who or what he did it to." Anyone can understand that. Fish says everything else in that sentence is just additional information about one of the three basic elements.
He took a three-word sentence like that and expanded it to more than 100 words by adding information about who did it, what he did, and whom he did it to. It was perfectly understandable because the relationships of all the words were clear.
Sentences that use the verb "to be" are a slightly different frame. What follows the verb is usually more information about the person, place, or thing the sentence is talking about. "He is tall." Again, you can add information about those three elements almost indefinitely as long as the connections are clear.
Conjunctions and prepositions show an infinite variety of relationships between words, ideas, even two thoughts combined into a single sentence.
Fish's basics are almost as simple as this summary of them. The rest of the 157 pages are filled with additional explanations and examples, many of which are entertaining, all of which are clear and easy to understand.
Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished Professor, and a professor of law, at Florida International University. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Illinois-Chicago, where he was dean of liberal arts.
SOURCES
Fish, Stanley, How to Write a Sentence, And How to Read One. 2011, Harper Collins, ISBN 978-0-06-184054-8, 160 pp.
,
Strunk, William and White, E.B .,The Elements of Style (Fourth Edition, 2000), MacMillian and Co., 4th edition, paperback, ISBN 0-205-30902-X, 85 pp.
Ken Braiterman - Ken Braiterman writes columns for the Concord (NH) Monitor print and online editions. He also writes and lectures on recovery from ...
