Photo courtesy New Statesman
Stanley Fish, New Statesman
In learning how to master the art of putting words together, the trick is to concentrate on technique and not content. Substance comes second.
A sentence is a structure of logical relationships. Notice how different this is from the usual definitions such as, “A sentence is built out of the eight parts of speech,” or, “A sentence is an independent clause containing a subject and a predicate,” or, “A sentence is a complete thought.” These definitions seem like declarations out of a fog that they deepen. The words are offered as if they explained everything, but each demands an explanation.
When you know that a sentence is a structure of logical relationships, you know two things: what a sentence is – what must be achieved for there to be focused thought and communication – and when a sentence that you are trying to write goes wrong. This happens when the relationships that allow sense to be sharpened are missing or when there are too many of them for comfort (a goal in writing poetry but a problem in writing sentences). In such cases, the components of what you aspired to make into a sentence stand alone, isolated; they hang out there in space and turn back into items on a list.
Armed with this knowledge, you can begin to look at your own sentences and those of others with a view to discerning what is successful and unsuccessful about them. As you do this, you will be deepening your understanding of what a sentence is and introducing yourself to the myriad ways in which logical structures of verbal thought can be built, unbuilt, elaborated upon and admired.
