How to Write a Sentence (4 page)

CHAPTER 4
What Is a Good Sentence?

But even if you follow my advice and become adept at producing well-formed sentences and at diagnosing ill-formed ones, you are only halfway home. You may be able to write a sentence; you still have to learn how to write a
good
sentence, and before you can do that, you have to know what a good sentence is. And this is where content, banished from the discussion so far, comes roaring back in. Content, the communication in a thrilling and effective way of ideas and passions, is finally what sentences are for. But just as you can’t produce a sophisticated meal without a thorough knowledge of ingredients, seasonings, sauces, temperatures, utensils, pots, pans, and much more, so you can’t produce powerful content in the shape of sentences that take your readers by storm without having a command of the devices—formal devices—that are at once content’s vehicles and generators. Those devices make the enterprise go, but they are not, except for linguists and grammarians and sentence nuts like me, ends in themselves. The end, the goal, the aspiration is to say something, and the something you want to say will be the measure of whether you have written a sentence that is not only coherent but good.

“Good,” however, is a measure that cannot be reduced to a set of features or a taxonomy. You can’t produce a good sentence—a sentence not only well formed but memorable—by consulting a recipe. Indeed, even a bad sentence—a sentence that creaks or is clumsy or is overblown or is impossibly loose—can be a good sentence. There’s an NPR program called
The Annoying Music Show,
and when the remastered set of Beatles albums came out in 2009, an episode was built around it. The cuts played included Tiny Tim singing “Hey Jude” and Telly (Kojak) Savalas singing “Something in the Way She Walks.” These performances were truly bad and they were truly good. They were bad because in both instances the voice, the pace, and the intonation were all wrong for the song; hearing the Beatles’ version in the background of these dismal renditions was painful. But the performances were good for the same reason. The
point
of playing the cuts—not the point of recording them originally—was to provoke just such a counterpoint in the listener’s mind. That’s what makes the whole thing funny; and if it’s funny, it’s good, at least in the context of
The Annoying Music Show
.

The important word in the previous sentence is “context” and it should be paired with another, “purpose.” People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved. That is why the prescriptive advice you often get in books like Strunk and White’s
The Elements of Style
—write short sentences, be direct, don’t get lost in a maze of piled-up clauses, avoid the passive voice, place yourself in the background, employ figures of speech sparingly—is useful only in relation to some purposes, and unfortunate in relation to others. The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is “What am I trying to do?”

The answers are innumerable (that is why examples, not rules, are what learning to write requires), but one of them won’t be “to tell it like it is.” It is often said that the job of language is to report or reflect or mirror reality, but the power of language is greater and more dangerous than that; it shapes reality, not of course in a literal sense—the world is one thing, words another—but in the sense that the order imposed on a piece of the world by a sentence is only one among innumerable possible orders. Think about what you do when you revise a sentence: You add something, you delete something, you substitute one tense for another, you rearrange clauses and phrases; and with each change, the “reality” offered to your readers changes. An attempt to delineate in words even the smallest moment—a greeting in the street, the drinking of a cup of coffee, the opening of a window—necessarily leaves out more than it includes, whether you write a sentence of twenty words or two thousand. There is always another detail or an alternative perspective or a different emphasis that might have been brought in and, by being brought in, altered the snapshot of reality you are presenting. This does not mean that your sentences are always incomplete and that you should strive to cram them full of everything in the universe on the model of what Molly Bloom does in the monologue from Joyce’s
Ulysses
. Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors. It is impossible not to select when you are making an assertion. The goal is not to be comprehensive, to say everything that could possibly be said to the extent that no one could say anything else; if that were the goal, no sentence could ever be finished. The goal is to communicate forcefully whatever perspective or emphasis or hierarchy of concerns attaches to your present purposes.

In his great book
How to Do Things with Words
(1962),
J. L. Austin considers the apparently simple sentence “France is hexagonal.” He asks if this is true or false, a question that makes perfect sense if the job of a sentence is to be faithful to the world. His answer is that it depends. If you are a general contemplating a coming battle, saying that France is hexagonal might help you assess various military options of defense and attack; it would be a good sentence. But if you are a geographer charged with the task of mapping France’s contours, saying that France is hexagonal might cost you your union card; a greater degree of detail and fineness of scale is required of mapmakers. “France is hexagonal,” Austin explains, is true “for certain intents and purposes” and false or inadequate or even nonsensical for others. It is, he says, a matter of the “dimension of assessment”—that is, a matter of what is the “right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing in these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions.”

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.