How to Write a Sentence

by Stanley Fish

  Once you’ve done it a few times, you can produce sentences like this forever. The skill is no different from the skill involved in turning three-word sentences into one-hundred-word monsters. It’s just that instead of trying to cram as much as you can into the spaces between the words, you’re trying to embed propositions in complex logical structures. Most of all you are practicing subordination, the art of arranging objects and actions in relationships of causality, temporality, and precedence. It is one thing to say, “x is the case,” and then to say, “before x was y,” and then to say, “x caused y,” and then to say, “linking x and y was z,” and then to say, “x is more significant than y.” It is another thing to say all of these in a single syntactic unit that breathes design and control. (This distinction does not imply a judgment of superiority; as we shall see, the additive style—one assertion after another—can be as artful as the style that embeds.)

  The technical term for the accomplishment of the subordinating style is hypotaxis, defined by Richard Lanham as “an arrangement of clauses or phrases in a dependent or subordinate relationship” (A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 1991). Hypotaxis, Lanham explains, “lets us know how things rank, what derives from what” (Analyzing Prose, 1993). (The fact that “hypotaxis” is a Greek word tells you how old the classification of styles is.) The James sentence is a modest version of the style. More elaborate versions can go on forever, piling up clauses and suspending completion in a way that creates a desire for completion and an incredible force when completion finally occurs.

  Near the end of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (1891, 1924), the hanging of the title figure is presented in a sentence that delays the event by filling in its circumstances. As a result, when it finally occurs, it has been freighted with layers of meaning:

  At the same moment, it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended, and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.

  The action of the sentence and its main clause are simple: “Billy ascended.” But he ascends in the context of allusions to both the Annunciation—the upturned faces play the role of the shepherds—and the Crucifixion. By the time he acts, Billy is both sacrifice and savior, the slain lamb and the lamb whose blood redeems; he is the centerpiece of what the sentence describes as a “mystical vision.” Because we have been made to wait for the filling in of the vision, which comes complete with viewers of what might almost be a large Renaissance painting, the moment of ascension seems static and staged; motion is stopped. But the “and” that follows “ascended” functions as a release—we experience it as a pregnant pause—and the present participle “ascending” initiates an upward movement syntactically, visually, and thematically. (One hears an echo, perhaps, of lines 11 and 12 of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29: “Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.”) Like the gaze of the “upturned faces,” our gaze soars upward, missing entirely the pain of the hanging; and the sentence misses it too, coming to rest where Billy rests, in the glory of the full rose (a pun on “rise”?) of dawn. He is risen.

  Where in Melville’s sentence the clauses preceding the main event lean backward, in this famous sentence from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963), they lean forward, straining to get where you know long before the end they are going to go:

  . . . when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

  King is replying to the question (sometimes asked by his colleagues in the movement) “Why don’t you wait a while and hold back on the sit-ins and marches?” The answer is at once withheld and given. It is formally withheld by the succession of “when” clauses (the technical name is anaphora), that offer themselves as preliminary to the direct assertion but are the direct assertion; each “when” clause is presented as a piece of the answer, but is in itself fully sufficient as an answer. “Here is the reason we can’t wait,” each says, but if that isn’t enough, here is another and another. As the huge dependent clause (a clause that does not stand alone as a complete sentence) grows and grows, the independent clause—the sentence’s supposedly main assertion—becomes less and less necessary. Meanwhile, there is an incredible amount of cross-referencing and rhetorical counterpointing going on among the clauses as they advance inexorably toward the waiting, and foreknown, conclusion. A full explication of these inter-clause effects would require an essay. It would include an analysis of the rhyming pattern of “will,” “whim,” and “kill,” which links and bookends the pairs “mothers and fathers,” “sisters and brothers,” and “brothers and sisters.” It would include an analysis of the interplay between inner and outer that begins with the phrase “ominous clouds of inferiority,” continues with “her little mental sky,” and reaches a climax with King’s acknowledgment of “inner fears” that at once reflect and war with “outer resentments.” It would include an analysis of the progression from “nigger” to “boy” to “John” in counterpoint with the withheld honorific “Mrs.” and ending with the word “Negro,” which does not quite reclaim the dignity history has taken from it. But it is enough to note the main effect: the building of intolerable pressure as the succession of “when” clauses details the layered humiliations every black man, woman, and child suffers, and then the spectacularly understated, even quiet, anticlimactic conclusion “then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

  It is a tremendous rhetorical achievement, a sentence for the ages, but again you can learn how to imitate it, if not to match it. Pick any topic, even a trivial one, say, getting up in the morning in the face of all the reasons not to: “When you’ve stayed up all night watching Rocky for the twentieth time, when the temperature is below freezing and you’re warm underneath the blanket, when the day promises only drudgery and humiliation, when the conclusion that your life has been for naught and no one will miss you seems self-evident, when everyone you have ever cared for is either dead or angry with you, when the only pleasure you can anticipate is a cup of coffee you can barely afford, when the thought of one more day doing something you absolutely hate is unbearable, then you remind yourself of what Scarlett O’Hara said: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ ” The sentence is bathetic, even pathetic, but
its form is the same as the form of King’s sentence, and if you learn how to master the form, you can employ it “naturally” when you have something important to say.

  King’s sentence has affinities with what is known in the history of style as the Ciceronian period, a “long stately sentence which suspends the verb until the end . . . with chains of subordinate clauses and balanced antitheses” ( John R. Holmes, Encyclopedia of the Essay, 1997). Michael Sheehan offers as an example these lines from Hamlet. The speaker is Claudius, the brother of the hero’s murdered father: “Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen / Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state, / Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy, / . . . With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, / In equal scale weighing delight and dole, / Taken to wife” (Wordmall: A Blog About the English Language, 2006). Or, in short, I’ve married my brother’s widow shortly after his death. By delaying the verb, Claudius is able to provide his own analysis of the action he takes before he names it. He confronts the stigma against marrying one’s sister-in-law (see Leviticus 20:21) directly: once our sister, now our queen; he reminds his hearers that because she is his queen, she is theirs and a partner to his military power; he acknowledges the doubleness and dubiousness of the act with a series of paradoxical antitheses: defeated joy, mirth in funeral, dirge in marriage, delight and dole; he claims to have carefully considered what he is going to do (“In equal scale weighing”), and then, after all this buildup, he springs the simple, but not all that simple, fact of what he has already done: “Taken to wife.”

  One scholar explains that the characteristic effects of this style were achieved by advance planning: “one knew from the outset of a period where it was going and how it was going to get there” ( Jonas Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy, 1960). This describes the achievement from the perspective of the writer. The reader, however, doesn’t know where the writer is going; he knows only that the person taking him there is in control. Control is what this style at once performs and announces, and no one does it better than John Milton. At a moment in his pamphlet An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642), Milton rejects the praise of his writing style offered by an adversary and pushes away artfulness in a sentence that could hardly be more artful:

  For me, readers, although I cannot say that I am utterly untrained in those rules which best rhetoricians have given, or unacquainted with those examples which the prime authors of eloquence have written in any learned tongue, yet true eloquence I find to be none but the serious and hearty love of truth, and that whose mind so ever is fully possessed with a fervent desire to know good things and with the dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of them into others, when such a man would speak, his words (by what I can express), like so many nimble and airy servitors, trip about him at command, and in well ordered files, as he would wish, fall aptly into their own places.

  The basic structure of the sentence is “although . . . yet.” The “although” clause typically gives reasons why the statement or resolution in the “yet” clause is somewhat of a surprise or even a non sequitur. “Although I hate and fear this kind of situation, yet I’ll come with you.” “Although I don’t know what I’m doing, yet I’m going ahead.” (This is another formal structure that can be played with infinitely.) In Milton’s sentence the negative proposition that is supposed to throw the positive resolution “yet I can speak well” into relief is “I have no training in the arts of eloquence”: “Although I have no training in the arts of eloquence, yet I can speak well from the heart.” If the heart and the intention are good, the words will follow without the need of any rhetorical exertions. But Milton is playing rhetorical tricks from the beginning, and their effect is to take back the concession of the “although” clause even as it is being offered. “I cannot say that I am utterly untrained” neither claims nor disclaims training. “Utterly” is particularly coy. It says, well, I may have a little training, maybe even a lot. The phrase “or unacquainted with those examples” further undermines the supposed self-deprecation—yeah, I may have studied some of those virtuoso rhetoricians in many languages—and endows the speaker with the very credentials he is pooh-poohing. It’s as if a movie star were to get up and say, “Although I have only won four Academy Awards, yet I still have a modest talent to offer you.” So that when Milton gets to the hinge of his sentence—“yet true eloquence I find”—we are more than prepared for the self-praise that follows. He is obviously the one who is possessed by virtue and the desire to infuse it into others; it is his portrait that is being painted; he is “such a man” (“When such a man would speak”), and the false modesty of “by what I can express” is almost offensive. It is an “Emperor’s New Clothes” strategy in reverse: Milton is asking us to see him as rhetorically naked ( just plain old virtuous me, folks) at the moment when he completes a rhetorical triumph, the moment when his words perform exactly the action they are reporting, tripping about at his command. This is a textbook example of imitative form (sometimes called a fallacy, but it is not): Milton’s words do what they describe; they fall aptly in their own places just as those very words are being intoned. The note of triumph is unmistakable; the request for applause palpable and difficult to resist.

  Milton’s sentence celebrates an inner virtue that resists and masters the apparent flux of temporal life. In the conclusion to The Renaissance (1873),Walter Pater makes the opposite point—there is only flux; perdurability is an illusion—but he conveys it in prose that is as controlled and controlling as Milton’s. Pater has been explaining that the impressions that make up our experience are momentary and that each of them is “infinitively divisible” into smaller impressions that are themselves infinitely divisible. Then comes the sentence that matches Milton’s in the artfulness with which it enacts what it describes:

  To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our lives fines itself down.

  In this sentence the main assertion—“what is real in our lives fines itself down”—is again delayed by a series of clauses laid side by side, and these clauses take away in advance what the independent clause promises: a stable reality. The reader is repeatedly teased with a stability of reference that barely survives the moment of its (fleeting) appearance. In the first clause the (relative) stability is compromised before it appears. A wisp is already a “fleeting trace” (American Heritage Dictionary), but it is preceded in the sentence by “tremulous”; so what we have (or don’t have) is a trace of something we know not what, and that trace is itself quivering and escaping from our grasp. The next word, “constantly,” mocks us with the root “constant”—steadfast—but the constancy asserted is the constancy of continually “re-forming”—that is, always in the process of becoming something else; and even that process is occurring in and on a fluid medium, itself always re-forming “on the stream.” The next clause brings a word that promises to arrest the flux—“sharp”—but the noun it modifies is “impression”; and then we are told that we don’t even have the impression, only a “sense” of it (an impression of an impression), and that sense is itself a “relic” (a trace again) and that relic of a sense of an impression is “fleeting”; “more or less” does not allow us even to fasten on “fleeing.” The sentence’s summary statement affords us the temporary ease of the word “moments,” but immediately those moments are said to be “gone by”—now you see them, now you never did. The sentence’s final tease is the phrase “real in our lives,” which names everything that has been taken away. The phrase shines there for an instant before it is refined (“fines”) into something that will then refine itself ad infinitum “down” into the ever-receding world of fleeting, dissolving, infinitely divisible impressions.

  When the sentence is over, nothing is left but itself. Like Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and George Herbert’s “Church Monuments,” it scoffs at monumentality but is i
tself a monument. Although Pater and Milton proclaim antithetical messages in their sentences—one insisting on a unitary abiding truth, the other announcing that nothing abides—the two sentences are rhetorically similar: each leads the reader down a path that lies waiting for him or her; each says, in addition to the substantive things it says, you are in the company of a mind that has thought it all out and is delivering it to you with complete mastery.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Additive Style

  Sentences like Milton’s and Pater’s are not bashful about foregrounding the process of their own construction. They flaunt their artfulness and invite readers to share in the verbal pyrotechnics they display. But suppose you wanted to achieve another effect, the effect not of planning, order, and control, but of spontaneity, haphazardness, and chance. Then you might avail yourself of another style, no less artful, but marked by the appearance of artlessness. The fountain of this style is the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), who announces (in “A Consideration Upon Cicero”), “I write naturally and without a plan; the first stroke of the pen just leads to a second.” ( Je commence volontiers sans project; le premier trait produit le second.) Montaigne’s claim is to be expressing himself without premeditation or rhetorical design (Milton’s claim, but Montaigne actually means it): “I do not portray [finished] being; I portray passing . . . from day to day, minute to

  minute . . . This is a record of various and changeable occurrences, and of irresolute and, when it so befalls, contradictory ideas” (“Of Repentance”). The word “essay” means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression the prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable. Rather than indicating the logical progression of thought, connectives such as “thus” and “so” are just place markers; “but” and “and” are the words that carry the experience forward, the first signaling a thought going in a new direction, the second saying “and, oh, this has just occurred to me.” The technical name for the style is parataxis: “a coordinate, rather than a subordinate, construction.” (Don’t worry about the term; you don’t have to learn it, but it might be useful at a cocktail party.) The units of this kind of prose, explains historian of style Morris Croll, are “connected with each other by only the slightest of ligatures, each one carrying a stronger emphasis . . . than it would have if it were more strictly subordinated” (Style, Rhetoric and Rhythm, 1966). Montaigne’s translator Donald Frame sums up the style and its effect: “Free, oral, informal, personal, concrete . . . spontaneous in order, ranging from the epigrammatic to the ambling and associative. It communicates the flavor of the man” (The Complete Essays of Montaigne).