Author Topic: A much deeper and more erudite analysis of language and rhetoric  (Read 3304 times)

Joe Carillo

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Are you one of those who had bristled at these three evidently constricting and counterintuitive prescriptions of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style for good writing: (1) that to achieve it, you must “omit needless words”; (2) that “Vigorous writing is concise. When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter”; and (3) that you shouldn’t overwrite because “Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating”? Have you felt that these rules, among several others that “went on to become a defining American statement of what constituted good writing,” tend to influence many young writers to be cautious and dull instead, adopting a “minimalist style (that) becomes minimalist thought”?


If so, then Stanley Fish’s newly released book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One (HarperCollins, 176 pages), would be a most welcome validation of your contrarian thoughts about good writing. In this book, the outspoken columnist of The New York Times offers a deeper, more erudite analysis of language and rhetoric than Strunk and White. Drawing from the prose of a wide range of great writers from William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Henry James to Martin Luther King Jr., Antonin Scalia, Philip Roth, and Elmore Leonard, Fish’s incisive and highly entertaining work is much more than just a writing manual but “a penetrating exploration into the art and craft of sentences.”
 
“I belong to the tribe of sentence watchers,” says Fish in his book. “Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences. I am always on the lookout for sentences that take your breath away, for sentences that make you say, ‘Isn’t that something?’ or ‘What a sentence!’ And always the admiration is a rueful recognition that you couldn't do it yourself… It is the same with sentences that do things the language you use every day would not have seemed capable of doing. We marvel at them; we read them aloud to our friends and spouses, even, occasionally, to passersby; we analyze them; we lament our inability to match them.”

In “The art of good writing,” a review of How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One in the January 21, 2011 issue of The Financial Times, Adam Haslett says that “Fish’s catholic taste in prose offers a far richer introduction to the capacities of English language sentences” than Strunk and White in Elements of Style… “a blessed replacement to that old Strunkian superego forever whispering in your ear – cut, cut, cut.”

Says NPR.com in its review of the book last January 25, 2011: “Most people know a good sentence when they read one, but New York Times columnist Stanley Fish says most of us don't really know how to write them ourselves…Fish is something of a sentence connoisseur, and he says writing a fine sentence is a delicate process…a process that can be learned. (But) he laments that many educators approach teaching the craft the wrong way—by relying on rules rather than examples.”

Read an excerpt from Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One now!
 
Read “Think You Know ‘How To Write A Sentence’?” in NPR.org now!

Read Adam Haslett’s “The art of good writing” in The Financial Times now!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University, in Durham, N.C. He is the author of 10 books, including How Milton Works, The Trouble With Principle, Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change and There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too. His essays and articles have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.
« Last Edit: February 01, 2011, 08:10:36 AM by Joe Carillo »