Fish is a brilliant writer, so the book was enjoyable to at a lot of levels. His purpose is to cause his readers to fall in love with sentences. He prevails. If we want to become a great writer, argues Fish, we must love sentences.

The rest of the book is to show exactly what a great sentence is and what the forms in which these great sentences arise out of. While Fish guards from turning formulaic, he put forward to forms - the subordinate and the additive - that create great sentences. His method, in general, is to find great subordinate and additive sentences (in great books by great authors) and imitate them until you can sufficiently do it yourself.

While Fish is very inspiring and is encouraging at every turn that readers and imitators of great sentences can becomes writers of great sentences themselves, I was left with two questions:

First, where do young aspiring writers, eager to imitate great sentences, find great sentences to imitate? Fish gives us a handful of examples (maybe 4 in each chapter), but the reader is left wondering "What do I do now?" Where do I go to find sentences? Often, Fish's examples were sentences 100-150 words long. I can imagine a young writer being overwhelmed with the thought of trying to imitate it - I know I was.

Second, while Fish gave us a compelling stance on the important of the sentence, how do I put good (or great) sentences together? It seems to me that the obvious next step to good writing is taking these logical relationships (sentences) together with other logical relationships and form an argument. But Fish doesn't go there. It is certainly beyond his purpose, but the book seems to shortchange without it.

Overall, I liked the book. It made me want more, which I suppose is a good trait of the book. But it also makes me want to suggest other books – like "One Writing Well" – which provides more, over this one.