TGC Reviews

After I read Louis Markos’ review of How To Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish, I proceeded to get the book—the review has that effect. The book, at least for me, accomplished its main objective: cause the reader to love great sentences. Fish has an almost strange love affair with great sentences that lures his readers in. But what about its secondary objective to equip the reader to write great sentences? Well, I’m not so sure.

Fish left me with questions. He convinced me that to get better at writing great sentences, I must imitate the great ones. With three or four examples per chapter, Fish demonstrates how to practice imitation. All right, I’m convinced, but where do I find more of these great sentences? How do I pick out a great one from a good one?

I’m grateful that Louis Markos not only reviewed How To Write a Sentence for The Gospel Coalition but has also taken the time to answer a few of my questions about the task of writing a good sentence and more.

If I’m convinced that I need to imitate great sentences in order write ones myself, where do I go to find these sentences? Can you suggest a few places to start?

I would start with a writer whose beautiful and supple prose influenced me as a child and continues to influence me as an adult writer: Ray Bradbury. Pick up any of his short story collections (The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, etc.) and savor his sentences. I think you will find him less daunting than some of the more classical masters of prose. After Bradbury, move on to C. S. Lewis. His sentences tend to be shorter but no less rhetorically effective. Start with Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. G. K. Chesterton is another prose stylist, whose sentences are a bit more complicated than those of Lewis. I’d suggest Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man.

I’d suggest you then move on to some of the great Victorian prose stylists. Try Newman’s Idea of the University, John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, and Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Then treat yourself to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol; read it slowly and savor the prose. If you want a taste of American prose, try Emerson’s Essays or Thoreau’s Walden.

Finally, challenge yourself with the Sermons or the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions by John Donne. Donne is a master of baroque prose, and his sentences are truly works of art. Along with Donne, try Milton’s “Areopagitica” and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. When you are finished, perhaps pick up a novel by Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Sun Also Rises) to experience a very different, deceptively simple prose style.

What makes a great sentence better than a good sentence?

A good sentence conveys its meaning in a clear and balanced way. The sentence becomes great when it takes on a life of its own—when you enjoy reading it, not just for what it teaches you, but for its sound and its tone and its music. A great sentence should be savored like a gourmet meal or like a piece of fine music. When you read it, you say to yourself, “Yes, that is just right; that is the one right way to say it.” When you see Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers, you stop and think to yourself: “I’ve never really seen a sunflower before.” When you read a great sentence, it’s as if you’ve never really read a sentence before or realized what wonderful things sentences are.

Here is one example of a sentence—actually it is only part of a sentence—that can be savored again and again, even by people who do not believe in life after death. It comes from a meditation by John Donne:

[A]ll mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

Being a good writer doesn’t stop at writing one great sentence, but a number of them together, forming an argument. What counsel would you give a young writer who wants to become better at making a clear and sustained argument? Any great examples to emulate?

The traditional answer to this is to come up with a thesis and three points to back up that thesis. That is a helpful start for students, but to become a great writer one must learn to write sentences and paragraphs and whole essays that grow organically, like an oak tree growing out of an acorn. The central idea needs to flow and develop and grow from one sentence to the next. So often, essays read like discrete beads on a necklace: a string of loosely linked sentences that lack any real coherence. As you move from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph, there needs to be good transition—not just in terms of linking words (however, but, therefore) but in terms of linking ideas that propel the argument forward.

You might try reading some of the essays that were written by the two men who essentially invented the form: Montaigne in France and Bacon in England. A very accessible essayist from the 20th century was E. B. White (who co-wrote that famous book on the Elements of Style that Fish critiques in his book). Pick up the Essays of E. B. White and see how he develops his ideas. The humorous essays of Mark Twain and James Thurber are also fun to read. There was a day when great essays appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, but they have fallen away from their great days. Touchstone and First Things, however, continue to publish very fine Christian essays. If you can handle the very secular, very liberal bias of The New York Review of Books, you will find very fine essays there as well. The New York Times Review is more balanced, and also offers some good thoughtful essays.