How to Write a Sentence

Harper Collins sent me a copy of Stanley Fish's little book entitled How To Write a Sentence and How To Read One and I'm wondering who, exactly, it's written for. It's not for me and my over-educated ilk; we play with sentences the way he describes all the time. It's not for people who don't read; he assumes familiarity with the works of 17th-century poets like John Milton and George Herbert. The chapters remind me of nothing so much as the blog posts of Amateur Reader, little musings on the style and sense of a previous era in which how you said something was nearly as important as what you were trying to say.

Fish tries to appeal to a broader audience than usual by sketching out the inclusiveness of his project:

"Some people are bird watchers, others are celebrity watchers; still others are flora and fauna watchers. I belong to the tribe of sentence watchers. Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences....some of my fellow sentence appreciators have websites: Best Sentences Ever, Sentences We Love, Best First Sentences, Best Last Sentences. Invariably the sentences that turn up on these sites are not chosen for the substantive political or social or philosophical points they make. They are chosen because they are performances of a certain skill at the highest level. The closest analogy, I think, is to sports highlights."
(Note: some of these websites don't exist by anything like the name he gives them, and for others I can only guess he might mean a site like 100 best first lines from novels.)

So is he trying to appeal to sports fans? It seems heavy-handed and awkward to me, like an elderly, bespectacled professor assuming that the football players in his class can only appreciate ideas in terms of sports analogies, and that bird watchers will appreciate being singled out from the other "fauna watchers."

The distance between Fish's privileged position as an academic and his floundering attempts to connect with the "common man" results in sentences like these:
"This, then, is my theology: You shall tie yourself to forms and the forms shall set you free. I call this the Karate Kid method of learning how to write."

This imagined common man will, I predict, get tired of the more lectur-y parts of the book, like where Fish feels compelled to define "essay" and use the correct rhetorical term for a coordinate construction; Fish himself evidently feels this, as he inserts a parenthetical remark:
"(Don't worry about the term; you don't have to learn it, but it might be useful at a cocktail party.)"
Yes, Stanley, when we travel back in time to the 1950's and the Dean invites us over for drinks.

The writing is better later in the book, when Fish lets himself get more carried away by the raptures of George Eliot and Philip Sidney--although he slips back into his fake, jocular "appeal to the common man" when he describes the speed of an effect as "almost like fuel injection." When Fish allows himself a full academic expanse of utterance, he can illuminate his subject like no one else. Discussing a section from Milton's Apology, he says:
"This sentence, a mini-essay on the relation between ethics and aesthetics, enacts what it describes. It argues implicitly against the commonsense assumption that the craft of writing is one thing, the moral worth of the writer another. Milton insists that the two are one, and that without the latter, the former is impossible."

Perhaps because he's in full-blown academic discourse mode by the end of the book, Fish ends up twisting some of his own sentences into tortured grammatical form:
"...a novel nearly every sentence of which merits a place in this book."
Such an awkward phrase distracts me from the sense of what he's saying, and makes me aware of that elderly, bespectacled speaker again.

But then he regains his place in his lecture notes and all is well again. The reader can be carried away by a quotation from John Donne to the conclusion that "The same imperfection and finitude require from us the writing of sentences (as opposed to the instantaneous knowledge of everything), and some of those sentences, like this one...reflect self-consciously on the conditions of their performance."

The oddity of publishing these kinds of thoughts in book form at this point in the twenty-first century is highlighted by the epilogue, in which Fish invites "those readers who can't believe I failed to include their all-time favorite sentence to send it to me" without specifying a mechanism by which this might be possible. He needs to have a graduate assistant set up a website for him. If he did, would you send him your favorite sentence?