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.
