How to Write a Sentence (2011) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Characters/People edit see section history

• Stein: Pure genius!
• Milton: Add a description of this character.
• Woolf
• Dorothea
• Dowell
• John
• Conrad
• James
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Donne
• Updike
• Artie Shaw
• Hemingway
• Sterne
• Pilate
• Michaels

Quotes edit see section history

• “Without the specter and period of death, there would be no urgency of accomplishment, no expectations to be realized or disappointed, no anxieties to be allayed. Each moment would bear an equal weight or equal weightlessness, the ideal, you will remember, to which Gertrude Stein aspired. Significance would not be in the process of emerging, sometimes clear, sometimes not; rather it would be evenly distributed and therefore not be significance – a concept that requires that some moments stand out – at all. In short, there would be no sentences, no temporal ordering of events in an attempt to make sense of them and of life. The meaning of things would be immediately and transparently present and it would be everywhere and always the same. This is the condition of eternity, a state of being we mortals can know only by negative inference, by imagining, in time, the negation of time...”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• (1) a sentence is an organization of items in the world; and (2) a sentence is a structure of logical relationships.

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• Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

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• It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.

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• But if one understands that a sentence is a structure of logical relationships and that the number of relationships involved is finite, one understands too that there is only one error to worry about, the error of being illogical, and only one rule to follow: make sure that every component of your sentences is related to the other components in a way that is clear and unambiguous (unless ambiguity is what you are aiming at).

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• Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding.

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• People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.

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• This, then, is my theology: You shall tie yourself to forms and the forms shall set you free.

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• The subordinating style orders its components in relationships of causality (one event or state is caused by another), temporality (events and states are prior or subsequent to one another), and precedence (events and states are arranged in hierarchies of importance).

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• If you can write a sentence in which actors, actions, and objects are related to one another in time, space, mood, desires, fears, causes, and effects, and if your specification of those relationships is delineated with a precision that communicates itself to your intended reader, you can, by extrapolation and expansion, write anything: a paragraph, an argument, an essay, a treatise, a novel.

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• “Just get the first sentence right, everything else will follow.”

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• France
• Austin

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Stanley Eugene Fish (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 808.042

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Reference › Words & Language
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Books & Reading

Books Cited by This Book edit see section history