Four Books on Writing
Two of them specifically about that all-important unit of prose, the sentence
For a long time, I assumed that my tendency to slowly read several books at once (rather than efficiently finishing one before moving on to the next) was a bad habit—and/or a sign that my ability to focus was deteriorating along with my bones.
But thanks to
(and his book Four Thousand Weeks), I now see it instead as an adaptation, a way of dealing with the frustration of not having enough time for everything. Even though I’m enjoying one book, I also can’t wait to read the next one.So naturally, I’m in the middle of several books about language and writing.
Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark, by Cecelia Watson
This beautifully researched book is so much more than a history of the semicolon. Reaching back to the Italian humanists of the 15th century, Cecelia Watson recounts the evolving efforts to clarify language with punctuation and “scientize” it with grammar.
But in her introduction, she points to a much larger story. In writing this book, she says:
Not only did I become a better and more sensitive reader and a more capable teacher, I also became a better person. Perhaps that sounds like a fancifully hyperbolic claim—can changing our relationship with grammar really make us better human beings? By the end of this book, I hope to persuade you that reconsidering grammar rules will do exactly that, by refocusing us on the deepest, most primary value and purpose of language: true communication and openness to others.1
Want more? Read this tantalizing excerpt from the book in the Paris Review.
How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, by Stanley Fish
Sentences “promise nothing less than lessons and practice in the organization of the world,” says Stanley Fish (7). The sentence is a form, and this book is all about mastering it.
Fish has described elsewhere his own preferred approach to the teaching of writing: he provides a sample sentence, analyzes the logical relationships of its components, and asks the students to generate similar sentences, “getting them to see that the motor of meaning production is form, not content.”
You have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of writing sentences. So it makes sense to begin with the question, What is a sentence anyway? My answer has two parts: (1) A sentence is an organization of items in the world. (2) A sentence is a structure of logical relationships.2
By reading, analyzing, and imitating the sentences of skilled writers, says Fish, we can learn to write better sentences ourselves. How to Write a Sentence offers a wealth of examples to learn from, along with exercises and insightful discussion.
NPR calls the book “part ode, part how-to guide to the art of the well-constructed sentence.”
First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life, by Joe Moran
I discovered Joe Moran’s First You Write a Sentence because
included it in a list of books “about how to write good sentences” that he’d encountered in the introduction to Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence, “a book of essays inspired by sentences from his commonplace book” (oh, dear, another book I want to read now).Moran calls sentences our “universal currency”:
Sentences are our writing commons, the shared ground where every writer walks. … By learning to make sentences, we learn not just about writing but about everything. The sentence is where we make the briefest of senses out of this mad, beautiful, befuddling mess: life. (2)
He’s especially interested in the importance of music to the success of a sentence:
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. (7)
In chapters on word order, sentence length, and the saying of “wondrous things with plain words,” Moran demonstrates an inspiring fixation on the process of “finding the right fit between the thought you want to express and the form it fits inside” (3).
The Art of Revision: The Last Word, by Peter Ho Davies
Peter Ho Davies may be best known for his fiction, but in his contribution to Graywolf Press’s “The Art of” series on the craft of writing, we see him as a consummate reader and teacher.
Davies argues that the particular kind of “re-seeing” involved in revision is “a shift from seeing our work through the eyes of its writer to seeing our work through the eyes of a reader” (63). In order for the text to change and improve, the writer too must change.
In an interview with Catapult, Davies explained how the problems he saw his students encounter during revision shaped the project of the book. Their frustrations
seemed to call for a different approach, a more expansive outlook that went beyond the idea of revision as a to-do list of things to fix. … What I began to wonder is if revision might also be a skill or technique of its own—a mindset, indeed, which might ask us to revise ourselves as much as our work—and that’s what spurred the more expansive approach in the book.
Read an excerpt at LitHub.
Enjoy!
Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark (New York: Ecco, 2019), 9–10.
Stanley Fish, “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3,” New York Times (September 7, 2009).