How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish Read Free Book Online Page B

writing three-word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction. Keep them short, employ parallel structures, use the present tense, limit yourself to relatively small words. “If you’re waiting for fortune to smile, you may endure many a dark day.” “Do your best, but expect the worst.” “When someone rises to a point of principle, watch your back.” “Politicians promise relief but give you grief.” I made those up, and they’re not very good; but I think I could get better, and if I did, I would become more skilled in the succinct presentation of wise sayings. At the same time, I would be forced to think about what a wise saying is and perhaps even to ponder the nature of wisdom. A discipline in form is a discipline in thought. There’s an aphorism for you, and it may even be wise.
    Sentences that package wisdom confidently always feel planned rather than spontaneous. Shorter sentences feel planned because they have the proverbial air of being prepackaged. The writer is saying, “I didn’t make this up on the fly; I’m just giving form to what everyone knows.” Longer sentences can achieve a similar effect by calling attention to their own construction. The writer is saying, “I’m not just putting down whatever comes into my head; I’m giving you the ordered fruits of my considered deliberations.” Here, for example, is the opening sentence of Henry James’s story “The Real Thing” (1892):
    When the porter’s wife (she used to answer the house-bell), announced “A gentleman—with a lady, sir,” I had, as I often had in those days, for the wish was father to the thought, an immediate vision of sitters.
    Rather than putting the reader in direct contact with the event it describes, this sentence filters the event through layers of reflection. There is the reflection that comes along with framing the event in the past: “I had an immediate vision of sitters.” (The speaker, we learn later, is a portrait painter.) The narrator reports on his thinking; he doesn’t engage in it on the page. Before reporting on it, he gives it a history and a pedigree; it wasn’t a spontaneous thought but one he had often (“as I often had in those days”) and it is a thought that he generalizes into a type with an aphorism: “the wish was father to the thought.” Because it is parenthetical, that aphorism delays the forward progress of the sentence; as the sentence pauses, the narrator seems to hover above it (this is a second layer of reflection), watching it unfold. The sentence’s forward progress has already been delayed by the parenthetical clause “she used to answer the house-bell,” a superfluous piece of information that serves only to push the perspective from which the “action” is observed further back into the past. These effects are frowned on by textbook writers who tell you (as Joseph Williams does in Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace , 1981) to avoid interrupting verbs and objects. The force of James’s sentence depends on just such an interruption, which puts a screen between the reader and the immediacy that might be the goal of another writer who was trying to impart information succinctly or issue orders with the force of a command or pass down a recipe.
    You can learn to write sentences like James’s. You start with a kernel assertion, say, “the door opened.” And then you back up in time to a prior action or event presented in what is called a dependent clause: “As he reached the crest of the hill and saw the house with its imposing spires.” Throw in a bit of parenthetical meta-reflection: “—they looked like spears ready to impale him—”; and then slow down the concluding assertion: “the door, moving it seemed under its own power, opened.” And then you have it. “As he reached the crest of the hill and saw the house with its imposing spires—they looked like spears ready