FIRST YOU WRITE A SENTENCE

The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life

By Joe Moran

A well-formed sentence, Joe Moran writes in his humane and witty guide to meaning-making, “is a cure, however fleeting, for human loneliness.” We all write more sentences now than ever, but how hard do we think about the shape of these etheric objects? A good sentence is a considerate gift; or maybe it’s an easeful, mapless walk with your reader, through a new city — but it might also be a high-wire act (audience agog for disaster). Moran’s book contains many such metaphors for the sentence, and at least one for figurative language itself: “Metaphor is how we nail the jelly of reality to the wall.” Is the sentence a transaction, or is it an artifact? Polished performance or open invitation? “First You Write a Sentence” is a “muted love letter” to the form, arguing in its genially opinionated way for sentences that make our lives more democratic and more pleasurable.

Moran is a professor of English at Liverpool John Moores University; he sounds like a drolly exacting teacher. Like most authors who wish to make writers of their readers, he spends part of his lesson telling us what not to do. He mocks the sclerotic nounifying of English — “website content delivery platform” — and the way verbs and simple nouns become solid, pompous nominalizations such as “temporality” and “positionality.” He laments the prepositional evasions in academic and managerial writing: all those “notions of” and “issues surrounding.” But Moran’s advice is chiefly positive. He is especially good on rhythm, syntax and structure. In English prose, an urging motion is all; Moran quotes the music critic Ian Penman, who calls rhythm “the whisper of unremitting demand.” Attend to your writing’s metrical satisfactions, keep the clauses short (which means you may have as many as you like) and vary your sentence lengths — your reader will want to hear and know more.

At the calm heart of Moran’s rhetorically affable book is an idea of adroit aplomb. He thinks a sentence should slide down the gullet like a clam, hardly touching the sides. His own prose is much like this. Unlike many writers on style, he doesn’t get carried away with examples; those he provides tend to be by masters of the almost invisible art of elegantly simple diversion. The mind and ear enjoy, but don’t get snagged on, the language of William Tyndale’s English Bible, Thomas Merton’s essays, the recipes of Elizabeth David. The sentences Moran likes derive from the loose, Senecan style perfected in the 17th century by the likes of John Donne, rather than ones from the stiff, hierarchical period of Samuel Johnson a century later. The best modern sentences resemble Donne’s, with simple statements upfront, then a pileup, if need be, of clause upon appositive clause, clarifying, elaborating, potentially without cease — but casually, too, always ready to end.

As a primer in generous and lively writing, “First You Write a Sentence” is blithe and convincing. But it’s possible to care too much for order, cool and elegance, to overpraise the magician’s sleight of hand and miss the trick itself. Moran doesn’t care for verbal or syntactic acrobatics, for writing that draws attention to itself. But isn’t extravagance sometimes itself the message? Don’t we long for some friction, some grit in the oyster? For (just to choose two of my favored sentence-workers) the awkward allure of a William H. Gass metaphor, the strange skewing of syntax in a writer like Elizabeth Hardwick? Walter Benjamin wrote that a truly great sentence is one that’s been burnished to perfection, then sabotaged in some respect. Wounded or weakened just sufficiently to seduce.