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

by Joe Moran

A sentence is more than its meaning. It is a line of words where logic and lyric meet—a piece of both sense and sound, even if that sound is heard only in the head.

Rookie sentence writers are often too busy worrying about the something they are trying to say to worry enough about how that something looks and sounds. They look straight past the words into the meaning that they have strong-armed into them. They fasten on content and forget about form—forgetting that content and form are the same thing, that what a sentence says is how it says it, and vice versa.

Rhythm is so basic to language that it does not need to be taught. You can correct a child’s syntax and pronunciation, but if they have no feel for the rhythms of speech, they will not sound human. The rhythm of English stresses certain syllables within each word and certain words within each sentence. It makes us linger on nouns, adjectives and verbs and skip lightly over pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions.

The syllabic stress patterns of speech sync up with the heartbeat we hear in the womb, the pulses of air in the lungs, the strides of walking and running.

Pleasing patterns play upon the brain’s circuitry in ways that benefit the human tribe. We find pattern and symmetry pleasing in nature because it gives order and sense to the world.

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.

But writing a good sentence is hard—as hard, in its own way, as calculus. Even if you can get words in their basic order, you still have to put them in a way that moves, interests and charms the reader. To be able to write a sentence that someone else might read voluntarily and with pleasure is the work of a lifetime. I have been doing it for forty-odd years and sometimes I think I am getting the hang of it.

The purest form of love is just caring—paying someone else the compliment of your curiosity and holding them in your head, if only for a moment. The purest form of praise is to pay attention. This is how we offer up the simplest of blessings to the world around us and to the lives of others.

Learn to love the feel of sentences, the arcs of anticipation and suspense, the balancing phrases, the wholesome little snap of the full stop.

In his essay “Standing by Words,” Berry argues that the sentence is the indispensable tool with which we see, feel and know the world. “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.” Along with writing and teaching, Berry farms. Since moving back to his home state from New York in 1964, he has worked a few acres on a hillside in the bluegrass, overlooking the Kentucky River. Like most farmers he is unsentimental about nature, seeing it as something to wrestle with and work round.

When you really wrestle with a sentence, and consider all the ways it can go wrong, you see that writing even a single one is a leap in the dark, with no assurance that it will land in a place that lets it make sense to someone else. Writing a sentence is slow and laborious whichever way you come at it. So labor-saving devices—like those salad tossers and egg slicers that claim to speed things up but actually just litter your kitchen—don’t help much.

Inflected languages such as German and Latin depend less on word order. Wherever they are in the sentence, the subject and object are marked by their word endings. English has only a few such inflections. In an English sentence, word order is (almost) all.

We tend to think of words as the patterned tiles of the sentence, and syntax as the grout that glues them together and keeps them watertight. The first rule of sentence-making is that it works the other way round. Syntax is what brings the words to life and makes them move.

Stick to time, manner and place and your sentence will never seem cluttered. For you will be relaying an unbroken action in the world of linear time and three-dimensional space within which all of us are stuck. In the early hours I took off my shoes and crept into the spare room. That night I slept fitfully on an inflatable bed. The next day I rose late and went downstairs with a sheepish look.

A sentence, as it proceeds, is a gradual paring away of options. Each added word, because of English’s reliance on word order, reduces the writer’s alternatives and narrows the reader’s expectations. Yet even up to the last word the writer has choices and can throw in a curveball. A sentence can begin in one place and end in another galaxy, without breaking a single grammatical rule.

We take our reading cues from syntax, so when the words fill the right slots, we cannot help but shape them into sense and imagine the world they suggest. Leave bits of silence, unsaid words between your actual words and gravid pauses between your sentences. Amid these gaps, implications sit. If you resist spelling it all out, the rhythm of the words makes its own eerie sense. A sentence must say something, but it can be a half-said thing and the better for it.

Writing, Kurt Vonnegut once said, allows “mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence.” Making even one good sentence may be hard, but it is worth it—just to edit our thoughts into fluent intelligence, to build a ladder of words up to our better selves.

Nouns should bring us closer to the world.

We need concrete nouns to name solid things, and abstract nouns to give the vague notions in our heads a nouny solidity. Only with both of them can we capture what

“the noun is only a grappling iron to hitch your mind to the reader’s.” If the reader does not know roughly what it refers to already, the sentence in which it appears may be a short unmeeting of minds. On

How do you breathe life into sentences choked with nouns? Simple: use verbs. Disinter the buried verbs and bring them back to life by reverbing them. Unspool the noun strings, restoring the proper links between the nouns by adding verbs and prepositions, even if this means using more words. Turn weak verb–noun phrases into verbs. Puts emphasis on: emphasizes. Gives the impression: suggests. Draws attention to: notes.

Turn other parts of speech into verbs. Verbs born of adjectives—we dim lights, tame hair, muddy prose—can be especially cinematic.

People who love words—crossword solvers, anagram lovers, Scrabble players—love nouns and adjectives. But people who love sentences love verbs. Nouns, because they name something permanent, have just one form. Of all parts of speech they are the most self-sufficient and singularly resonant. But verbs take many forms, often irregular, depending on what role they play in the sentence. They are useless by themselves, and rarely as euphonious as nouns or adjectives. But put

A sentence brings together a noun, which names a thing, with a verb, which says something about that thing. That is all a sentence needs: everything else is optional. If you put the right nouns and verbs in the right slots, the other words fall into place around them. By varying the types of noun and verb, you give your sentences a grain and texture that begins to approximate life. The task is to layer reality without extracting too much verbal heat—to be intricate but not convoluted, and just as simple as is needed, but no more.

You cannot do without the adverbs that explain where something happens, like nowhere or upstairs, or when or how often, like yesterday or more. Adverbs simplify writing as well as embellish it. Latinate verbs can be swapped for those verb–adverb combos, common in English, called phrasal verbs. These replace one word with two (bad) but they use strong verbs and cut syllables (good). Illuminate: light up. Extinguish: put out. Surrender: give up. When plain stylists call for the culling of adverbs, they mean one kind: those that add the suffix -ly to an adjective.

Barthes uses adjectives: new, innocent, credible. And that when he calls the adjective “the poorest of linguistic categories,” he needs two adjectives to do it. Adjectives, like weeds, cannot be eradicated, only tamed.

Adding to the vast pile of existing sentences is like adding another stone to a hilltop cairn. You have agreed to join in one of humanity’s joint endeavors—cairn-building or sentence-writing—when no one else is watching. 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.

But those elusive parts are everything. A sentence written solely via some slide-rule calculus of readability will never be quite good enough. Writing has to be humanly messy, non-algorithmically flawed, to be truly readable. Something in us balks at the idea of applying algebra to words, because words, unlike numbers, can move, hurt, anger, enchant and cajole, and build credible worlds of thought and feeling out of nothing. That “little bit of creativity” is all. A sentence needs a glint of human intelligence behind it to give it the elusive thing, sentience, that makes it a sentence.

On one point the readability research is irrefutable. As average sentence length rises, comprehension falls. Chains of long sentences with long words are off-putting to even the most able reader. After about twenty-five words, a sentence is getting into its third clause, or maybe the second phrase after a main clause. The reader’s memory starts to crumple under the weight.

when the ideas are complex, it is even more crucial not to saddle the reader with long words and phrases, so he can expend his mental energy on the ideas. The sentences of “difficult” writers like Nietzsche, Kafka and Beckett are often as short and clear as those in Mr. Men books. They may be hard to fathom but they are seldom hard to read.

If you swiftly deliver the main news of the sentence, the subject and verb, then the rest of the sentence can unfurl itself less hurriedly. Christensen called this the “cumulative sentence.” In class, he gave his students a simple subject and main verb and got them to attach “free modifiers” to it. He called them this to distinguish them from bound modifiers, like adverbs and adjectives, which fit in specific slots in the sentence.

Write a plain sentence. Spiders are loners. Then just add a phrase, and keep adding. Spiders are loners, working at night to build their webs, cross-hatched creations best seen on dewy mornings, each silken strand shining with water beads, the whole edifice flimsy enough to be destroyed by a stray human leg, and yet, in its filigree and symmetry, a thing of beauty, and also of utility, for this lone spider will spend its whole life in contact with its self-made silk—tightening its lines, slinging lassoes and awaiting its prey.

Every writer is a poet by default and every sentence a little poem.

I love this thought.

Editing is best begun by lifting whole blocks from the work first, rather than trying to overcompress at sentence level. This is painful—there goes that bit I strove and wilted over—but it is the only way. Write in sentences, edit in paragraphs. Then start writing in sentences again.

Flow, for your reader, means a state of fierce but happy concentration. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that this occurs when a person’s mind and body are so immersed in a task that each stage runs seamlessly into the next. Flow is the optimal combination of muscle and nerve, of thought and feeling, effort and pleasure.

Flow is joyful, Csikszentmihalyi writes, because our minds crave order. Without order we are adrift in a meaningless world, with oblivion the only certain end. Humans are always “cheating chaos,” making order out of the world’s glorious confusion.

Here is another way of cheating chaos: write a sentence, then another, then another. Somewhere deep in unrecorded time the human brain evolved an inner voice, but it was wandering and unruly. The invention of the sentence helped us shepherd that voice into sense and offer up its contents to others.

A sentence is not about self-expression but about editing your thoughts into a partly feigned fluency, building a ladder of words up to a better self. Train your ears, for how a sentence sounds in the head is also what it says to the heart. The bones of a sentence are just a noun and a verb, so put the right nouns and verbs in the right slots and the other words fall into place around them. Good prose is not a windowpane: a sentence reads best when the writer has tasted and relished the words, not tried to make them invisible.