What Makes a Good Sentence? by Eddy Yue

Aim for Clarity and Brevity

yueyecheng2005 — 2024-02-19 22:50:45 UTC

George Orwell: A common piece of writing advice is to make your sentences plain, unadorned and invisible. George Orwell gave this piece of advice its epigram: 'Good prose is like a windowpane.' A reader should notice the words no more than someone looking through glass notices the glass.

George Orwell's example: Perhaps he should have written: 'If you can cut a word, do.'

Pursue Purity and Precision

yueyecheng2005 — 2024-02-19 22:51:32 UTC

James Baldwin: "For James Baldwin, the only goal was 'to write a sentence as clean as a bone'."

Capture Complexity of Thoughts

yueyecheng2005 — 2024-02-19 22:52:02 UTC

Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf wrote that she wanted to go beyond the 'formal railway line of sentence', to show how people 'feel or think or dream … all over the place'. Her serpentine sentences, held loosely together with dashes and commas, catch the butterfly restiveness of the human mind, and the evanescence of human life.

Virginia Woolf's example: Her long, elastic thought refrains collide with shorter, percussive fragments. A year into the second world war, she wrote this defiant sentence in her diary: 'Thinking is my fighting.'

Balance Logic and Lyricism

yueyecheng2005 — 2024-02-19 22:52:29 UTC

Moran's Observation: A sentence is much more than its literal meaning. It is a living line of words where logic and lyric meet – a piece of both sense and sound, albeit the sound is only heard in the reader’s head.

Kate Moss's example: The model Kate Moss, once asked for her motto, replied: 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' – a well-turned sentence, surely.

Ensure Sentences Unfold in Space and Time

yueyecheng2005 — 2024-02-19 22:52:46 UTC

Moran's Insight: A line of words should unfold in space and time, not reveal itself all at once, for the simple reason that it cannot be read all at once.

John Donne's example: John Donne’s sermons are full of sentences that are ever-alert and open to the world: 'And into that gate they shall enter, and in that house they shall dwell, where there shall be no Cloud nor Sun, no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light … '.

Value Individual Sentence Impact

yueyecheng2005 — 2024-02-19 22:53:29 UTC

Gary Lutz: A decade ago the American writer Gary Lutz gave a lecture to Columbia University students titled 'The sentence is a lonely place'. Lutz told them that he was drawn to writing in which 'the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language'.

Utilize Space and Silence Between Sentences

yueyecheng2005 — 2024-02-19 22:53:43 UTC

Contemporary Writing Trends: Contemporary writers mostly side with Lutz. They leave space and silence between their sentences, so that the reader can see the full stop and hear its click.

Maggie Nelson's example: Maggie Nelson leaves gravid pauses between her sentences and paragraphs, where implications sit. Her book The Argonauts tells the story of a developing romance and relationship in short paragraphs and single sentences surrounded by white space.

Craft Each Sentence to Lead into the Next

yueyecheng2005 — 2024-02-19 22:53:59 UTC

Moran's Advice: If a writer’s sentences have enough life and interest in them – with 'every step an arrival', as Rainer Maria Rilke put it – they will hold the reader and move the writing along. The writing finds a hidden unity that has no need of the mucilage of linking phrases.

Annie Dillard's example: Annie Dillard likes to start or end her paragraphs by swerving into unexpected terrain: 'Why do we concern ourselves over which side of the membrane of soil our feet poke?'

Image Citations

yueyecheng2005 — 2024-02-22 02:51:14 UTC

https://www.citizenwatch-global.com/the-citizen/lineup/cal0100/index.html

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/capturing-complexity-valentijn-van-nieuwenhuijzen/?trk=articles_directory

https://www.space.com/time-how-it-works

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/company-values

https://www.ctpublic.org/health/2014-12-29/there-is-no-such-thing-as-silence

https://www.vrogue.co/post/logic-and-emotions-in-balance-pictured-as-words-logic-emotions-and

https://diyprojects.com/diy-craft-sites/