How to Write a Sentence

by Stanley Fish

  How many dimensions of assessment—of purposive contexts within which assertion occurs—are there? The inventory would be endless. There is the military dimension of assessment and the mapmaker’s dimension of assessment and the political dimension of assessment and the economic dimension of assessment and the domestic dimension of assessment and on and on. It is within these dimensions of assessment that any assertion or sentence is uttered, and it is within these dimensions of assessment that the objects to which sentences “refer” come into view. I put “refer” in quotation marks because the word implies that the object comes into view apart from whatever is said about it. That implication is wrong. You can say what France is like from a culinary perspective or an energy perspective or an agricultural perspective, or myriad other perspectives, but you can’t say what France is like from no perspective or dimension of assessment whatsoever. The question “What is France really like?” cannot be answered if by “really” is meant independently of any vocabulary that might be employed to describe or characterize it. What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment. When I said earlier that a sentence is an organization of items in the world, I intended the word “organization” strongly: it is an organization that shapes the items it gathers in by relating them to each other in some ways, but not in all ways. The skill it takes to produce a sentence—the skill of linking events, actions, and objects in a strict logic—is also the skill of creating a world.

  Philosopher Nelson Goodman calls this process of creative representation “ways of worldmaking.” We commonly call those ways “styles.” “Style” is a word that is often understood as one member of an opposed pair: “style versus content,” or “style versus meaning,” or “style versus substance.” In these binary formulations the non-style pole is usually the favored one—content over style, meaning over style, substance over style. The suggestion is that style is not only secondary and parasitic; it is meretricious, and it would be better if we did without it. When Aristotle introduces the subject of style in Book III of his Rhetoric, he does so apologetically. I would like, he says, to advise you to present your case “with no help beyond the bare facts,” but given the tendency of men and women to be influenced by emotional appeals and the tricks of eloquence, it is necessary to give instruction in the arts of rhetoric. No one, Aristotle declares plaintively, “uses fine language when teaching geometry,” because geometry is a system of pure forms.

  Aristotle initiates a tradition in which the desire is to make language so transparent a medium that it disappears and interposes no obstacle or screen between the reader and the things it points to. The Roman Cato made the point with characteristic brevity: “Seize the thing, the words will follow” (rem tene, verba sequentur), where “follow” should be taken literally: words come after, not before. In the seventeenth century, Bishop Thomas Sprat of the Royal Society proposed that “eloquence . . . be banished out of all civil societies” because the ornaments of speech “are in open defiance against reason” (History of the Royal Society, 1667) and are allied instead with the passions. In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift took this idea to its logical and absurd conclusion when his Gulliver reports on the “scheme” undertaken by the Academy of Lagado “for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever” (Gulliver’s Travels, 1726, 1735). Since words only stand in for things and have the unhappy tendency of substituting themselves for the things they should represent, “it would be more convenient,” say the academicians, “for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on.” Gulliver observes (and behind him we can hear the mocking voice of Swift) that a major liability attends this project: the man who engages in it “must be obliged . . . to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back.” Indeed, Gulliver recalls, “I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs . . . who when they met in the streets, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together.” This would be a very limited conversation, extending only to the display of discrete items. If the “sages” wanted to relate these items in some way—subordinate one to another or arrange them in a sequence of cause and effect or rank them in a scale of usefulness or value—the machinery of predication complete with tenses, moods, modifiers, adversative conjunctions, adverbs, and much more would have to be employed. Once that machinery was set in motion, the “pure” world of things, so dear to the heart of the Catos and Sprats of the world, would have receded and become components in language’s structure, the structure that would have given those things the meanings they do not possess in and of themselves.

  What Swift is telling us with his characteristic wit is that the dream of doing without words will never be realized as long as we desire to produce complex statements rather than mere lists. Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead. The shaping power of language cannot be avoided. We cannot choose to distance ourselves from it. We can only choose to employ it in one way rather than another. We can only choose our style, not choose to abandon style, and it behooves us to know what the various styles in our repertoire are for and what they can do.

  This form of knowledge is very old and it has been codified many times. The classic codification is Cicero’s three-part taxonomy: the grand or ornamental style, the middle style, and the low or plain style. The grand style is ceremonial or exhortative; the middle style is conversational and amiable; the plain style is unadorned and suitable for explaining and teaching. The styles are sometimes correlated with subject matter; the grand style for the most important things, the middle for matters of everyday concerns, the low style for inconsequential matters. And still another correlation is with effect, depending on whether you want to move your audience, please your audience, or instruct your audience. Because these distinctions were taught in the schools and known to all literate readers, the very choice of a style says something even before anything substantive is said. Cicero’s audience knows what it’s in for when he begins his First Oration Against Catiline (63 B.C.) with these famous words: “How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience, how long will that madness of yours mock us?” We don’t give formal orations anymore, but we do rise to speak at meetings, and we do give welcoming remarks on a variety of occasions, and we do (some of us do) address juries in opening and closing statements, and we do write letters of application and nomination. In these and many other contexts, the first step in producing good sentences is to decide what style you will use to communicate your message, a decision that sends a message of its own.

  Cicero’s classifications are canonical—they have had a long life—but they are not exhaustive and they do not correspond to eternal types. They codify conventional practices—time-honored correlations of formal features and purposive contexts—and what we know about conventions is that while they can be very powerful, they can change and fall into decline. This means that any classification of classifications, any survey of styles, is at best a historical snapshot of some ways of achieving some effects so long as certain sociopolitical conditions—conditions that form expectations writers can use strategically—are in place. And that means that the categories I use to organize this book are, in a nonculpable sense, arbitrary, though they have not been chosen randomly. I believe them to be real and to correspond to choices writers might make; but I also believe that other categories could easily have been employed to good effect. Indeed, the list of sentence types is endless and is always being added to. New ways of doing things with language’s limited but protean repertoire of forms are always being invented.

  Here is a very partial classification of sentences, some of which will turn up in these pages, some of which won’t. There are short sentences and long sentences, form
al sentences and colloquial sentences, sentences that satisfy expectations and sentences that don’t, sentences that go in a straight line and sentences that surprise, right-branching sentences and left-branching sentences, sentences that reassure and sentences that disturb, quiet sentences and sentences that explode like hand grenades, sentences that invite you in and sentences that exclude you, sentences that caress you and sentences that assault you, sentences that hide their art and sentences that ask readers to stand up and applaud. The language’s resources are finite, but the effects that can be achieved by deploying them are not, and the skill of writing is to find those (formal) resources that will produce the effect you desire. Here is Edgar Allan Poe making the point in a question that should, he says, be in the forefront of every writer’s mind at the beginning of the task:

  Of the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?

  (“The Philosophy of Composition,” 1846)

  In short, pick your effect, figure out what you want to do, and then figure out how to do it.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Subordinating Style

  Although there are any number (an infinite number) of things you might want to do, effects you might want to achieve, two are general enough to serve as a basic classification and as a port of entry into the wonderful world of sentences. They are again formal categories; that is, one can distinguish between them without reference to content; but they are powerfully different and different in a way that has a content of its own. Let’s call them the subordinating style and the additive style (they have different names in the technical literature). The subordinating style orders its components in relationships of causality (one event or state is caused by another), temporality (events and states are prior or subsequent to one another), and precedence (events and states are arranged in hierarchies of importance). “It was the books I read in high school rather than those I was assigned in college that influenced the choices I find myself making today”—two actions, one of which is prior to the other and has more significant effects that continue into the present. Contrast that sentence with this one: “I read Hamlet, and the entire semester was a drag and I learned how to fly.” There might be some relationship between reading Hamlet, having a bad semester, and learning how to fly, but the sentence doesn’t specify it; rather it just reports these events in a loose sequence, like beads on a string, without pressuring the reader to order or arrange them. That is the additive style (in one of its tamer versions). Each style has its beauties and its uses, and each typically projects a distinctive personality with a distinctive way of looking at the world. By choosing one or the other (they can of course be mixed and matched), a writer conveys something even before anything substantive has been said.

  Suppose, for example, you want to communicate confidence in your assertions and suggest that no one could possibly be of any other opinion. You might write a subordinating sentence like the one that opens Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:

  It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

  In this sentence the claim of general truth is explicitly announced in the first clause, and the status of what follows it is established before it appears. But even if the sentence read: “A single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” the effect would be achieved. The sentence would then divide in two, with “be”—a verb that declares something to be the case—as the hinge. The two clauses—“A man in possession of a good fortune” and “in want of a wife”—exhibit parallel structures: “a man in possession of ” and “in want of.” Possession of fortune is not enough; it must be completed, in the world and in the syntax, by the possession of a wife; “must be” does not invite dissent; it is the equivalent of “Who could think otherwise? Why else would a man have a fortune?” The relative brevity of the sentence is important in securing the effect; it suggests a portable truth that can be carried about and produced at any time. Sentences like this are rhythmic in feel and easy to remember; they can be delivered with a click and a snap. “A stitch in time saves nine.” “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” “Out of sight, out of mind.” “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

  The terms for this kind of sentence are many: aphorism, proverb, adage, dictum, apothegm, sententia, maxim. The name is less important than the form, which is the pithy pronouncement of wisdom in a manner that does not invite disagreement. Austen’s sentence does not quite fit the pattern: it’s a bit too long, and because attention is called to the absoluteness of the claim, that claim is ever so lightly undermined; “must be” in combination with “truth universally acknowledged” is a little bit too insistent and allows us to suspect an author mocking her own absolute pronouncement. It may seem counterintuitive, but you’ll have a better chance of persuading readers that what you are about to say is universally acknowledged as a truth if you don’t actually use the phrase “It is a truth universally acknowledged.”

  Just as you can practice 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 o
n 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 to impale him—the door, moving it seemed under its own power, opened.” Not James by any means, but a passable cheap imitation.