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

Moran, Joe

 
9780143134343: First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing . . . and Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143134345 ISBN 13: 9780143134343
Verlag: PENGUIN GROUP, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

“Do you want to write clearer, livelier prose? This witty primer will help.” —The New York Times Book Review

An exploration of how the most ordinary words can be turned into verbal constellations of extraordinary grace through the art of building sentences

The sentence is the common ground where every writer walks. A good sentence can be written (and read) by anyone if we simply give it the gift of our time, and it is as close as most of us will get to making something truly beautiful. Using minimal technical terms and sources ranging from the Bible and Shakespeare to George Orwell and Maggie Nelson, as well as scientific studies of what can best fire the reader's mind, author Joe Moran shows how we can all write in a way that is clear, compelling and alive.

Whether dealing with finding the ideal word, building a sentence, or constructing a paragraph, First You Write a Sentence informs by light example: much richer than a style guide, it can be read not only for instruction but for pleasure and delight. And along the way, it shows how good writing can help us notice the world, make ourselves known to others, and live more meaningful lives. It's an elegant gem in praise of the English sentence.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joe Moran is a professor of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1.

A Pedant's Apology
Or why I wrote this book

First I write a sentence. I get a tickle of an idea for how the words might come together, like an angler feeling a tug on the rod's line. Then I sound out the sentence in my head. Then I tap it on my keyboard, trying to recall its shape. Then I look at it and say it aloud, to see if it sings. Then I tweak, rejig, shave off a syllable, swap a word for a phrase or a phrase for a word. Then I sit it next to other sentences to see how it behaves in company. And then I delete it all and start again.

If there were a pie chart that divided up my time on earth, the colored slice that covers writing sentences would be the biggest, apart from the one that covers the thing everyone does: sleeping. I don't count how much writing I have done each day, but if I did I wouldn't count words, I'd count sentences. Sentences are my core output, the little widgets I make in my workshop of words. It helps to think of it like this, as just cranking out a daily quota of sentences, instead of being a writer, which feels like a claim that will need to be stamped and approved. I write maybe three and a half thousand sentences a year. Is this too many, or not enough, or about right? I have no idea. I write one sentence, then another, and repeat until done. I don't know when done is.

Some writers claim to have sentences in their heads hollering to get out. Flaubert wrote that he was "itching" with them. These writers just seem to have a knack for putting words into right-seeming order, as if it were a skill as randomly allotted as being able to wiggle one's ears. Not me. But I can spot a good tune when I hear it. I know what a good sentence looks and sounds like, so that when I come across one in my own writing I have the good sense not to delete it but to try and replicate it. Having only minor gifts has its compensations. It has forced me to think hard about how words join up and why some sentences work better than others. A nightingale has no idea why such a bewitching noise emerges from its throat; a human nightingale impersonator must parse every note.

I may give more time to them than most people do, but we are all of us, of school age and older, in the sentences game. Sentences are our writing commons, the shared ground where every writer walks. A poet works with them, but so does the unsung author who came up with Items trapped in doors cause delays or Store in a cool, dry place. Every kind of writer writes in sentences. Even the most clueless or careless strew their writing with capital letters and full stops, in the hope that they will turn what lies between them into this universal currency. 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.

In 1940 a soon-to-retire Cambridge math don called G. H. Hardy published a defense of his life's work. His field was the purest form of mathematics, number theory, and his book was meant to be a mea culpa for spending his life on something of no practical use that few people would ever understand. In fact, although he called it A Mathematician's Apology, it was not very apologetic.

Hardy declared that maths had given him his life's "one great permanent happiness," and that, when the world was immolating itself in war, it offered a consolingly parallel universe of spare, numbered beauty. Applied maths, the kind that could compute the dimensions of the Forth Bridge or the reach of a radio transmitter, he decried as "trivial." Real maths, he thought, bypassed the world in pursuit of pure abstraction. It was useful only rarely and never on purpose. Like Einstein, Hardy felt above all that equations should be beautiful. "A mathematician, like a painter or a poet," he wrote, "is a maker of patterns."

A mathematical equation and a written sentence have much in common. Both rely on symmetry and balance, often asserting a connection between the seemingly different. Both explain reality in as elegantly concise a form as they can. Both reduce randomness to inevitability, their equal signs or clauses falling into place with a rightness that renders the inchoate and incoherent suddenly clear. Both tell us something about the world outside themselves-but both also swim in their own kind of beauty.

Pure mathematicians, like Hardy, have long debated whether advances in their field are invented or discovered. Is an elegant equation a piece of human handiwork, or the unearthing of an eternal reality that was there before some fortunate human chanced upon it? The same question might be asked of an elegant sentence, which seems to sit somewhere in this Tom Tiddler's ground between invention and discovery. Like an elegant equation, it has floated free of its maker and feels inevitable. It came out of a single mind but now belongs to the world.

Fixating on how a sentence looks and sounds, finding the right fit between the thought you want to express and the form it fits inside, can seem as removed from the real world as G. H. Hardy's mathematics. More so, perhaps, because, as Hardy wrote, human languages die but numbers live forever. To care about sentences as Hardy did about math, you must feel about them the way that he felt about numbers. In other words, you must know that, even as they try to explain and account for the world, nothing lies behind them but their own artifice.


Hardy's book has been an unlikely inspiration for mine. For this is a book of sentences written in praise of writing sentences. I want it not to school but to hearten, embolden and galvanize the reader-who is almost always, in some way, a writer. I hope it will say something useful about how to write a sentence and put it alongside other sentences. But really it is about why it is worth taking pains over a sentence, in a world where everyone seems to be speaking at once and finishing each other's sentences for them.

A lesson works best when it doesn't feel like one, when it feels instead like an attempt to repay the favor that was once done to the teacher-in my case, by the writers of other sentences that have instructed me in and delighted me into writing my own. So this book is not a style guide, if that means a series of prescriptions and proscriptions. But perhaps it is a style guide by stealth: one that tries to show what it wants to teach, or to show instead of teaching.

I was going to call it A Pedant's Apology-a mea culpa for spending my life worrying about something as small and minor- seeming as the sentence. But I am not sure I quite cut it as a pedant. Like most of my generation, my knowledge of grammar is a patchwork, sewn over many years and with thousands of holes in it.

I am still baffled by those sentence diagrams with the subject on the left and the verb on the right of a horizontal line, and modifiers veering off like motorway slip roads. However hard I try, I cannot link them in my head to actual sentences, the ones that are just a deceptively simple line of words. One of my sixth-form teachers told us that sentence diagrams were as vital to the study of sentences as skeletons were to a medical student studying anatomy. If she was right, then I will never be a doctor of writing. I scrabble my way through my own sentences on hunches and happenstance.

But then I remind myself that the English sentence belongs to everyone, not just those who like to police other people's use of it. I dislike writing advice that worries only about the sameness of surface features and that minds more about meticulousness than music. The literal meaning of meticulous is "being careful out of fear." Fear feels like the wrong feeling with which to start making sentences. For me it is not the veneration of rules but...

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Verlag
PENGUIN GROUP
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143134345
ISBN 13 
9780143134343
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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Plovdiv
Bulgarien

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