How to Read a Sentence by Stanley Fish

"Some people are bird watchers," Stanley Fish tells us in the introduction to How to Read a Sentence, "others are celebrity watchers; still others are flora and fauna watchers. I belong to the tribe of sentence watchers." He is a sentence fetishist, determined not only to make us aware of the sublimity of the well-written sentence, but to deconstruct it for us so we might make our own. Fish, as a professor of law, has faculties finely tuned for this business.

Grammar and sentence-making, Fish says, are being taught in entirely the wrong way in our schools. Rote memorization of parts of speech (What the hell is a gerund, an English teacher at my school asked today) is ineffective and confusing. Instead, we must come to understand sentences as logical constructions made of forms, commonsense relationships between words and phrases that we more or less know intuitively. The key is imitation. For example, he takes this sentence by John Updike, about Ted Williams' home run in his last at bat in Fenway:

It was in the books while it was still in the sky.

...and dissects the way that "while" provides the "fulcrum of the sentence," and that on either side of that fulcrum are different registers (one literal, one less so) that must be reconciled, and then notes that we too can imitate this:

Here is my (relatively feeble) attempt: "It was in my stomach before it was off the shelf."

...and that by this imitation we may not create a masterpiece, but we expand our own ability to express the thoughts which are most vital to us.

It is unclear to me exactly who this book is written for--it seems most appealing to other sentence fetishists, who probably don't need Fish to explain much to them, though it offers some appeal in the way a trainspotter might be fascinated by watching a locomotive being repaired. It seems unlikely that anyone will go through the kind of exercises that Fish recommends, unless, of course, he or she happens to be a student in Fish's freshman comp class at Florida International. Probably its most appropriate audience is folks like me, sentence fetishists charged with the grammatical tutelage of America's future. (I would say also you, Danny, were it not true that you hate sentences.)

All told, the most fascinating aspect of How to Read a Sentence is the catalogue of great sentences that Fish marshals for his tinkering. I am pleased to say that Fish includes quite a bit from The Good Soldier, "nearly every sentence of which merits a place in this book." In a recent contest on Slate, Fish judged the best of reader-submitted sentences, of which I am pretty fond of this one, from the Bible:

Then Amnon hated her with very great hatred; so that the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her. (2 Samuel 13:15, RSV)

And without further ado, here is, while not My List of Greatest Sentences, perhaps My List of Greatest Sentences That I Chanced Upon While Leafing Through my Bookshelf for This Review:

Updike, describing the way men “bump” into women in Rabbit, Run:

Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone.

Ford, in The Good Soldier:

But still, she listened to you and took in what you said, which, since the record of humanity is a record of sorrows, was, as a rule, something sad.

Forster, talking about newlyweds in A Room with a View:

Ah! it was worth while; it was the great joy that they had expected, and countless little joys of which they had never dreamt.

Austen, being snarky in Persuasion:

The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea, because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before.

What are your favorites?

The Elements of Style by William Shrunk JR. and E.B. White

"The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that comes to mind is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day."

The Elements of Style is an excellent book to read through and keep on hand as a reference. It gives a simple and compact list of rules and common writing mistakes, as well as giving guidance on how to develop an effective style.

The book lays out the basic grammar and general style rules. The major focus being to teach us how to use the rules so that we can break those same rules effectively and create our own style. The writers encourage readers to be clear in their communicating and to build a structure on nouns and verbs, rather than adjectives and adverbs.

The difference between works which stand the test of time and works which die after their initial release are outlined. The book's own style reads like a textbook. The index and glossary make it an easy to use reference book, and its size makes it worth carrying with you. Familiarity with the content provides a foundation for young writers to expand into their own style.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to write. It offers the tools for writing clear, direct, logical prose. Shrunk and White set a high standard for writing. With most of the world offering their two cents worth in writing, I think this is great. They encourage us to shine out by first mastering the basics and then developing our genius as we discover it.

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynn Truss

I was in SC visiting Liz, and I was with her at her office with no internet and nothing to read. I enjoy punctuation as much as the next guy, so I picked up Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. If collections of essays don't lend themselves to reviewing, humorous punctuation handbooks lend themselves to it even less so, so I don't know how much I have to say about it. Lynn Truss is a pretty funny writer, and she had a lot of good one liners. Most of the grammatical rules, I already knew, although the evolution of certain punctuating characters was interesting, and I'm still hoping the interrobang will pass into popular usage.

I sort of like the panda bear with a gun on the front cover too. I'd read a book about him.