Writers begin their journey loving words. Later they learn to love sentences. Still later, they turn to obituaries. Or something like that. The point: Language is a cultural invention so its forms and our relationship to it is ever changing.

To become a better writer, then, is to grab hold of these various for their various purposes. For one, as Gertrude Stein put it: “paragraphs are emotional and sentences are not.”

Somewhere in here is how we develop our “writing voice.” Not exactly the same as how you speak but maybe, “a buried, better-said version of you,” as author Joe Moran put it in his 2018 book First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing . . . and Life.

It’s a lovely book, both for the craftsmanship Moran puts into his sentences and the wisdom he pulls together on stronger writing. I recommend it. Below I share my notes for future reference.

Notes:

• Mathematician GH Hardy believed applied math was trivial, this author was inspired to do the same for sentences
• “A sentence is a small sealed vessel for holding meaning.”
• James Baldwin wanted “to write a sentence as clean as a bone”
• “A sentence, too, should not advertise the labor that went into its making “
• Noam Chomsky: teaching animals to create sentences is like teaching a human to fly; a long jumper can do something that looks like it but it is fundamentally different
• Van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother: “What is done in love is done well”
• Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”
• Rilke of staring at a Cezanne “more seeingly”
• Les absents ont toujours tort (Those who are absent, are always wrong.)
• The word “sentence” comes from Latin to mean “to feel”
• Edward O Wilson: biophilia love of life, as humans love all that is vital and alive
• The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed (the first book generated by a computer): “In 1984 two New York computer programmers, William Cham Berlain and Thomas Etter, published a book of poems and shot pieces called The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed. I waster ten by a prose-synthesis program they had devised called Racter, short for raconteur. Racter arranged its 2,800-word vocabulary according to “syntax directives.” By conjugating verbs, remembering genders and matching pronouns, it could do something no bonobo chimp could do: make sentences out of words. These sentences were semantically surreal but syntactically flawless. Racter could sort its stack of words into a dry parody of scholarly method. “This dissertation will show that the love of a man and a woman is not the love of steak and lettuce.” Or it could work up a tone that nestled somewhere between flirtation and insult. “I was thinking as you entered the room just now how slyly your requirements are manifested.” Or it could join sentences together into wild, wondrous cadences. “Bill sings to Sarah. Sarah sings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb or stroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love but they also have typewriters. That is interesting.”
• In writing: syntax, word choice, punctuation and typography give meaning
• Most speaking isn’t in full sentences
• The first epigrams were epitaphs, marking death. They are the originators of writing (as opposed to the first writing that gave us spreadsheets) ; later they became a common art form where the idea of ending a sentence with punch first evolved
• “To clothe despair in eloquence is the show that it can be endured.”
• “The sprawling, epic in the sparse epigram with arrival literary forms of antiquity”
• “Thinking assumes settled weather” an old one sentence poem by Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006)
• Jenny Holzer credited in 1970s for bringing bank one sentence epigram wheat pasting reminiscent of those on vases in antiquity. She famously wrote “Protect me from what I want” over Times Square ads
• Robert Montgomery: “All palaces are temporary palaces” “ aging is a privilege, not a predicament.”
• David Snowdon’s 1986 Nun Study on Alzheimer’s: “idea density” is a predictor against dementia
• Louis Hyde wrote in his book The Gift that the driving force of human civilization has been the giving of gifts. “To have painted a painting does not empty the vessel out of which of the paintings have come,” he wrote. “On the contrary it is a talent which is not in use that has lost her atrophies, and to bestow one of our creations is the surest way to invoke the next. “
• University of Liverpool neuroscientists studied why we sometimes prefer clunkier Shakespeare to newer simpler modernized forms (a little difficulty intrigues us)
• A writer, said Thomas Merton, only makes occasional “raids on the unspeakable”
• Ultra conserved words that appear similar across language groups: give, I, hand, star, fire, man
• 2007 denaturing of the dictionaries; Robert McFarlane wants to “rewilding” of language
• Hayakawa: ladder of abstraction
• Michael Halliday says nominalization (turning verbs into nouns to define a process like act to action and react and interact) emerged in science communities of 17th century. They’re effective jargon but not beautiful; Author calls them white dwarfs (too dense for casual readers but efficient transmitters)
• Elizabeth Bishop’s 1970s list of words not to use include a lot of nominalizations
• English is now more than half made of nouns (this wasn’t always true)
• In 1968 Thomas Merton wrote in War and the Crisis of Language that a metaphor between glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and business/political jargon. He criticized political words like pacification, escalation and liberation (nominalization)
• “A sentence should be a labor to write, not to read” 65
• Only about a seventh of words are verbs and are rarely listed among favorite words but they give us action
• “People who love words,” wrote Joe Moran, “love nouns and adjectives. People who love sentences love verbs.”
• Mediopassive: “This sentence reads well”
• Ad copy: “this car handles like a dream”; “the butter melts on the tongue”
• “We live a lot in the past voice, since reality is an author of this poem, being written, without our help. Cushioned by the bubble wrap of modern comforts, we convince ourselves that we decide or fates.”
• David Bourland’s 1965 To be Or Not To Be essay argues for a new language without “to be” which represents half of all sentences but he feels is a cheat for modern thinking, equating things that cannot be equated (I am an idiot vs I behaved like an idiot)
• To be can be used for good in its barrenness or weak with nominalizations
• Ernest Fenollosa in The Chinese Written Character as A Medium For Poetry says the best language avoids “to be” and should only use transitive verbs (action verb and direct action)
• All sentences have finite verbs. There are also non-finite verbs (infinitives, participles verbal adjectives and gerunds verbal nouns). They can give heat or action to sentences (though doesn’t like the past participle with the use of to be)
• Past perfect and simple past let’s you move between the arrow of time but pluperfect can have too many “hads and was-es” so we try to limit with simple past
• Subjunctive and modal verbs are two ways to soften and consider alternative possibilities
• “Writing is an instrument for conveying ideas from one mind to another,“ wrote Ernest Gowers in his 1948 book Plain Words
• George Orwell wrote in his essay Why I Write that “good prose is like a window pane” insofar that it should just transport ideas but this author thinks it misses some of the fun of writing
• Tyndale’s Bible was meant to be read aloud. Not only does it sound as good as it reads, it also sounds in the head as you read.
• No one knows how far into the history of reading people started doing it silently. In his Confessions, St. Augustine is astonished to see Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, read without moving his lips. Plutarch said the same about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, and characters in Greek tragedies read letters silently. But Augustine was still right to be astonished- as we should be, still.
• One of the many forgotten miracles of silent reading is that it preserves the traces of reading aloud. Silent readers minutely move the nerves, and sometimes the muscles, in their throats, as if they were about to speak. However fast they read, they subvo-calize, hearing the words in their heads as the brain sends signals to the vocal cords. Like a musician who scans a score and hears the notes, they read with their ears and mouths as well as their eyes. Nouny writing is hard to read because it cannot be heard. It just welds together boilerplate phrases with none of the natural verbal vigor of speech. A sentence is meant to give off sound”
• Readers: get someone else to read aloud your sentences and edit where they stumble
• The first translator of the Bible into modern English in the 1530s has had a remarkable influence on the phrases still used today, in large part because of how lyrical his work remains. William “Tyndale has a trick to make his prose more speech-like: he uses short words. The ancient Hebrew and Greek of the Bible have few long words, nor does the language Tyndale relies on: Old English (in fact, words in Old English were not always short, because its inflections added syllables. But words that derive from Old English, shorn of these endings as they were by Tyndale’s time, are.) Old English words like ooze and spit retain an onomatopoeia that perhaps all words once had. Old English shut and shun sound out their meanings; Middle English close and Avoid do not. Old English verbs, like flee, beckon, bless, chide and chew, are full of, to use an Old English noun, pith. Old English words also feel close to speech. Normally each letter relates to a single sound, with few of the silent letters and phonetic oddities of newer words. Longer words like friendship and elsewhere seem composed of monosyllables, so they fold out into parts in your head. Words like bookhoard and starcraft have a blunt lyricism not shared by their modern equivalents (library and astronomy). Old English kennings, the compound nouns used as poetic synonyms-whale road for sea, bone house for body, battle light for sword- are plain-spoken poetry. In the centuries after the Norman Conquest, tens of thousands of words came into English from French, Latin, Greek and other languages. These words tend to be longer than Old English ones and more genteel. Conclusion, not end; assist, not help; per-spire, not sweat; deceased, not dead. But they also add economical exactitude to the language, because words like orthodox or imperceptible say with one word what once needed several. Old English words are still used far more than these Romance words, even though there are far more of the latter. Since Old English accounts for the basic mortar of a sentence like pro-nouns, articles and prepositions, you cannot write English without Old English words. And you can have a good stab at writing English using them alone. Old English is the tongue of a preliterate people, whose lives turn around family, tribe and the elemental world we know as children — of night and day, cold and dark, breath in life, meat and bread, hunger and thirst. Tyndale prefers old English solidity to Latin the remoteness. Freedom, not liberty; brotherly, not fraternal; folk, not people, foe, not enemy.”
• Poets love varying vowel sounds: “those yellow tinted shades are so cool”
• Many short words cut down on “schwa “
• “A sentence has more sonic force if there are more stress than unstressed syllables” short words and long words both only stress one so short words give a sentence higher percentage
• Richard Lanham “mumble speak” of writers not varying sounds (like -tion and -tate in academic writing)
• “Tyndale is fond of a trick the Greeks called polyptoton, repeating a word but in a different form or part of speech. ‘I have been a stranger in a strange land.’ ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ Accidental repetition sounds clunky and careless; intentional repetition sounds musical and meant.”
• Tyndale uses parataxis as opposed to hypotaxis: Ancient Hebrew, Greek and old English prefer former, Latin prefers latter: Hypotaxis might subordinate a phrase by leaving off relative pronoun: “I changed the dress [that] I was wearing, so it did not clash with my shoes.”
• Trade “although” and “since” for more “but” and “so”
• Paratactic writing makes all clauses equal weight. Hypotactic uses more subordinate clauses that feel more academic and measured
• “The plain style uses parataxis because its author is willing to sound slightly less clever than she is. She has agreed not to cloud her prose with a nit-picking nuance that is really a tacit avowal of her own cleverness. You and I know, the plain stylist says to the reader, that the world is not quite this straightforward. But let us pretend that it is for the duration of these words, so we can hack out a clearing amid the undergrowth of reality and, together, look around.”
• “Cutting words is a silent, invisible gift to the reader – and a thankless task, inevitably, since no one, but you knows you have done it”
• Miles van der Rohe : less is more
• Roland Barthes hated adjectives
• “Wine-tasting notes are just flailing, adjective-adled impressions – like trying to paint a noise, or photograph a smell.”
• “Adjectives like weeds cannot be eradicated only tamed “
• “Restless night” and “awkward silence” are examples of transferred epithet
• Ancient texts were written in scriptio continua, no spaces or punctuation; take no authority always from the readers who were elites; late punctuation was an invention to make reading easier which also meant it took interpretation away from readers. Monk scribes of Ireland were among the first to use spaces and punctuation to get the “true” sense of the Bible. Punctuation was all about breathing pauses, like musical notation but for reading aloud (Look at the semicolon)
• Venetian printers in late 1400s invented semicolon among other punctuation
• “Our punctuated text speech,” wrote Joe Maron, “wants so much to be like speech that it has forgotten it is writing.”
• “We ride alone, as an active faith, in the power of words to speak to others who are unknown and elsewhere.”
• Freud: Everyone owes nature a death
• George Orwell: “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”
• Hugh Kenner: the plain style of writing “nothing beats it as a vehicle for profitable lies” like Orwell aphorisms
• Rudolf Flech began readability consulting (he said under 20 word sentences and preferably 17, the average sentence length in readers digest)
• Flesch hired by AP; Gunning hired by United Press. They both wanted journalists to shorten sentences especially the “clothesline lede” in which a single long opening sentence summarized everything — in a practice dating back to Civil War
• Writing sentences isn’t about collecting it all but knowing what to let go
• Gunning found editors added foggier words than writers, presumably because they indulged themselves more than others
• “Sentences are getting shorter. At the start of the seventeenth century, the first great age of English prose writing, the average length of a sentence was forty-five words. This length held steady in the eighteenth century and then began to fall. In the nineteenth century it was in the thirties; now it is in the twen-ties. The English sentence, besieged by short writing from the fragments of ad copy to character-limited tweets, has shed words and narrowed the gap between full stops. The great sentence shortening of the last 200 years is probably ongoing.”
• “Long sentences are just overgrown graveyards, unconvincing arguments or conveniently buried.” But long sentences work when they’re varied. Average sentence length matters more than any one
• “The complexity of speech is choreographic – and intricacy of movement,” the linguist Michael Holiday writes. “That of writing is crystalline – a denseness of matter.”
• Francis Christensen’w Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence ; he called for simplicity (hated king noun phrases); to make long sentences work “set their heart beating at once by putting a subject and main verb at the start” writes Joe Moran. Christensen called those “cumulative sentences,” starting subvert and verb and then what he called free modifiers after
• Senecan amble (which Blaise Pascal called “the painting of thought”)
• Prepositions are a bad way to stitch up long sentences because they neither connect phrases clearly like conjunction or separate them clearly like punctuation
• Author says easiest free modifiers are the appositives that can come after and add context by renaming the noun or noun phrase it refers to. (Another free modifier is the absolute, which modifies the whole clause so can be put anywhere
• Relative clauses with “that” and “which”
• Parenthetical make the reader whisper, the em dash makes them read loudly, the comma keeps the same tone; Commas separate phrases not an independent clause
• Winston Weathers on the rhetoric of the series argues why three is the right list number
• 1979 WordStar introduced control key for cut and paste
• Kamau Brathwaite word processing is “writing in light” and Matthew Kirschenbaum said if camera hadn’t gotten there first we might call word processing the Greek phrase for light writing “photography”
• “A sentence is a social animal”
• “As Macaulay said of reading Seneca: ‘It is like dining on nothing but anchovies sauce – whereas Clive James wrote ‘Writing made only of killer sentences is like being constantly flicked with a wet towel.”
• Drop “the mucilage of linking phrases” like all the so and but that I do
• “A few hundred years ago, sentences were much more shackled together than now. They would begin with a whereof…to show that they were resuming an unfinished thought.
• And they would use lots of conjunctive adverbs, those worreis that show how clauses link up by, for instance, contrasting (however), adding (moreover), illustrating (namely) or proving (therefore). These adverbs are in long retreat. The use of indeed peaked in print in the eighteenth century and has been declining ever since. The number of howevers and moreovers has been falling since the 1840s. Readers today link sentences in their heads without lots of thuses and whereupons to do it for them.
• One kind of prose still clings to the conjunctive adverb: academic writing, and the forms that mimic it, such as the school and student essay. This writing connects itself up carefully with proofs, examples, exceptions, nuances, finessings and equivocations. All those of courses and admittedlys and to be sures are there to inoculate the writer against the shameful disease of naivety. Often such writing is just too watertight, too neurotic about purging itself of inconsistencies. Rather like sealing a boat’s hull with black tar, making prose unsinkable makes it ugly. It has sold its life and voice in return for that dubious virtue, invulnerability. Using too many conjunctive adverbs suggests that you don’t trust your reader to follow the native weave of your thought. Or you think that she doesn’t trust you, and that without all this qualifying and exemplifying, she will be picking endless holes in what you say. both these fears get in the way of the ideal of writing – as a gift from writer to reader.”
• Thoreau called those conjunctive verbs “preponderating paste”
• Author is fine with “but” if not over used, however should only accentuate the word before it
• Kevin Lynch influential 1960 book The Image of the City about how residents form mental images of their homes
• In 1973 a Polynesian sailing expedition to prove possible to travel by canoe from Hawaii
• In 1999, Donald Norman writes The Invisible Computer arguing computers need to fit better in our lives
• Hypernym-hyponym
• Henry Fowler “elegant variation”
• “Popular orange vegetable” in The Guardian
• Rhetoric tips of repetition: anaphora; epistrophe; anadiplosis
• Vary your sentence length to mirror how we think
• In 1894 EH Lewis’s book The History of the English paragraph: the first “tolerable paragrapher” was William Tyndale
• “Just like sentences, paragraphs have shrunk. From the fifteenth century to the turn of the twentieth, the average paragraph length stayed steady at about 300 words. Then, under the influence of newsprint, they got shorter. The thin columns of newspapers needed shorter paragraphs to break up the text into unforbidding chunks. The influence of advertising copy shortened the paragraph still further. Copy writing is all about the paragraphing”
• Aldous Huxley: it’s easier to write 10 decent sonnets than one good advertisement
• Fay Weldon on writing short paragraphs while raising young kids: “it was the most I could do to get three lines out between crises”
• “Writing is rewriting” cliche that writers build a smooth road for readers but may have spent years removing trees and blasting mountains. Work to make something. Flow and be smooth
• Write in sentences, edit in paragraphs
• Sprezzatura “studied carelessness”
• Humans are always “Cheating chaos”
• “You acquire a written voice not when you learn to sound like yourself, but when you perfect the knack of slotting words together so that they sound like a convincing impression of a whole, consistent person. A written voice is a composite of your skill at selecting and arranging words and your genuine care for and commitment to what they are saying. That voice is not you, but it may be a buried, better-said version of you. It was lost amid your disheveled thoughts and wordless anxieties, until you pulled it out of yourself, as a flowing line of sentences.”
• “Everything that needs to be said has already been said,” wrote André Gide (1869-1951). “But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”