Stanley Fish How to Write a Sentence Pdf

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1. Book Reviews
2. Afterword

Book Review: How To Write a Sentence, and How to Read One, by Stanley Fish

Jan 28, 2011 • 10 years ago • 5 minute read

How to Write a Sentence, and How to Read One

Stanley Fish has good timing: A book on crafting sentences is welcome in our age of super-compressed tweets, instant messages and off-the-cuff blog posts and comments. Not that Fish acknowledges such modern-day modes of expression; in his slim tome, the professor of humanities and law at Florida International University comes across as a connoisseur, not a polemicist: "Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences."

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Indeed, there's something to be said for the sentence as more than a purely utilitarian construct. Fish's interest is piqued primarily, he tells us, by "skill" — admiring sentences is like watching sports highlights, with "a rueful recognition that you couldn't do it yourself." That said, he believes one should try one's best, and his aesthetic appreciation is matched by a practical drive. Having taught composition courses and workshops at universities since the '60s, Fish has long insisted, against the grain of many an English department, that writing should be taught as an end in itself, that learning to write involves learning to think. His carefully crafted blog posts on the subject in The New York Times

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in the fall of 2009 created a furor as he insisted on the primacy of form over content in teaching; this book is, in a way, a development of his thoughts on the matter.

As its title suggests, How to Write a Sentence

is in part a how-to manual; it's also a book of analysis, and a paean to the written word and the ways it can be organized. Fish is a personable and insightful guide with wide-ranging erudition and a lack of pretension: To illustrate his points, he trots out sentences by writers and rhetoricians from Edgar Allan Poe to Martin Luther King, from John Milton to Elmore Leonard.

Not that he offers much context, historical or otherwise, for his choices: He prefers to consider sentences in isolation from the rest of their texts. This narrow focus is at once a virtue (Fish introduces the tools of close reading to those who have never delved deeply into a text's component parts) and a limitation. Bereft of a sense of narrative, the book can become somewhat wearying, akin to watching a collection of sports highlights being dissected by commentators who don't tell you much about the teams in question, or why the plays mattered.

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Fish begins, in the book's first half, by aiming to separate form from content; refreshingly, he finds a way to describe and analyze sentence structure using logic rather than dry references to parts of speech. He offers tools to unpack sentences that seem poised to collapse under the weight of many clauses, and then to build one's own, starting with a stable logical foundation. If we have the forms at our disposal, he argues, we'll be able to use them when we need to.

From there, he distinguishes between what he calls the "subordinating" and "additive" styles. In the first, word order is determined by an overarching, controlling point of view — think Jane Austen ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"). The latter is seemingly more ad hoc, suggesting the presentation of thoughts as they occur to someone — think Ernest Hemingway ("In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels"). Viewed from a literarily historical perspective, this opposition gets at important differences between conflicting traditions, but Fish, alas, doesn't follow them up — at times, it's the unexplored implications of what he's told us that are most interesting.

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Halfway though, Fish gives one of his chapters the dramatic sub-heading "The Return of Content," and from here, he's on firmer ground. After all, if, as he claims, language is perception, then content and form are effectively inseparable — perception, after all, requires an object. He analyzes a selection of great first sentences that "lean forward," examines wondrous last sentences, and closes with a chapter on what he calls "Sentences That Are About Themselves" — although he's somewhat cheating: The sentences he analyzes here enact what they assert, but they do function as integral parts of texts that interrogate much more than the circumstances of their own construction.

Fish is so preoccupied with individual trees that he hardly lets us glimpse the forest where they've been planted. It's one thing, for instance, to learn to craft sentences that are satirical unto themselves ("The trick … is to open with a deadpan observation that gives no clue to the nasty turn the performance will soon take"), but another to recognize satire when it evolves out of an aggregation of sentences. "Doesn't Fish have a sense of humor?" asked physicist Alan Sokal in 1996, after Fish denounced him in a New York Times op-ed for having published a hoax article in a journal published by Duke University Press, where Fish was the executive director. Fish was angered that Sokal had taken "care, as he boasts, to surround his deception with all the marks of authenticity."

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In other words, Sokal had all the forms down pat, and they seemed to fit his content, but the argument was pseudoscientific gobbledegook. One could say of Fish what Poe's fictional detective Dupin says about the real-life inspector Vidocq: that he "impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but in so doing, he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole." Why, then, should we trust what Fish has to say about the sentences he's analyzing in isolation? The answer is that we shouldn't, but Fish is persuasive and perceptive enough that he can drive us to look at the building blocks of all writing — our own and that of others — with fresh eyes. The sentence can be a thing of beauty, but ultimately, it's only ever one facet of the gem that is a text.

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Stanley Fish How to Write a Sentence Pdf

Source: https://nationalpost.com/afterword/book-review-how-to-write-a-sentence-and-how-to-read-one-by-stanley-fish

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