First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.

by Joe Moran

Talk to yourself at work and you are just sounding out your thoughts; talk to yourself in the street and others look away and give you plenty of pavement.

Worse than the words being wrongly arranged is putting them in an order that neither moves nor sings. The sentence just limps and wheezes along to its sad end with a tuneless clank. When the writer has a tin ear for the sound of a sentence then the reader knows, just as when she hears flat or pitchy singing, that something is wrong, even if she can’t quite say why.

Making a sentence sing is a way of making others more likely to listen and ourselves more likely to be understood. A good sentence gives order to our thoughts and takes us out of our solitudes. It is a cure, however fleeting, for human loneliness and for the chronic gulf of incomprehension that divides writer and reader, just as it divides any two of us.

‘A sentence,’ he writes, ‘is both the opportunity and the limit of thought – what we have to think with, and what we have to think in.’

A sentence must stick in the mind. It has to be literally memorable, never so intricate that it cannot be absorbed all at once. I prefer to cast the whole sentence in my head before I set it down, and only if I get stuck do I surrender and rough it out in writing. If I can hold it all in my brain, my thinking goes, so can a reader.

The act is its own reward; do not expect applause. You must be willing to keep writing in the absence of any evidence that anyone is reading. And no use complaining, either, since no one asked you to do it in the first place. The rewards of writing sentences are real, but they are long-deferred and mostly unconfirmed.

A long sentence too should be a beautiful, indelible gift. It should give pleasure without provisos, not buttonhole and bedazzle the reader with virtuosity. It can put the reader on edge a little, so long as this does not feel like its main point, so long as it feels as if the sentence has no ulterior motive other than the giving of its own life-delighting self. This is what readability scores will never tell you. They deal only with reading ease, not the knottier, exacting pleasures of expectancy and surprise, the teasing way that long sentences suspend the moment of closure.

Short and long sentences do different things. Short sentences make key points or recap them, and trade in swift action, jokes and little swerves in thought. Long ones take readers on a mental tour, offer a rambling inventory or knead and stretch out a thought like a pizza chef working dough. Short sentences give your brain a rest; long ones give it an aerobic workout. Short sentences imply that the world is cut and dried; long ones restore its ragged edges. Short sentences are declarative and sure; long ones are conditional and conjectural. Vary your sentence length and you mirror the way the mind works, veering between seductive certainty and hard-won nuance.

For those of us without a faith, the sentence feels, in some small way, devotional. It pays homage, not by thanking God for the world’s existence but by thanking the world itself for existing. The thanking happens not by worshipping but by noticing. We are the only animals who are truly paying attention. No other living thing seems to be curious about things that they cannot mate with, play with, scrounge off or eat. We humans are the noticers. If our lives have any point, which I doubt, it might be this: to notice the world with our own eyes and to wrap that noticing in words. For this we made the perfect receptacle – a sentence.

The most reliable antidepressant is rekindled curiosity, and only the curious try to draw bits of the world together into words. The word curious derives from the Latin cura, which also gives us both cure and care. Curiosity is a cure for self-absorption, the cure being to care about the world and lay down roots in it again. Reading and writing sentences is a means of laying down these roots, of achieving absorbedness. And to be truly absorbed in anything is to be blessed.