First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.

It helps, I think, to keep hold of something of that older sense of the writer as a carver of sentences. Consider the sentence as a crafted object that will take up space in three dimensions.

Letter-carvers had once been seen as artists, like painters and sculptors, but now they were looked on as mere artisans, like printers. Writers, meanwhile, had come to be seen as intellectuals or creative people, working with the mind, not as scribes, working with the hands.

We find pattern and symmetry pleasing in nature because it gives order and sense to the world.

A sentence, as it proceeds, is a gradual paring away of options. Each added word, because of English’s reliance on word order, reduces the writer’s alternatives and narrows the reader’s expectations. Yet even up to the last word the writer has choices and can throw in a curveball. A sentence can begin in one place and end in another galaxy, without

The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive. The artist Robert Montgomery wrote that sentence after a friend from art college was hit by a car and killed.

Racter’s lesson for the sentence writer is never to say everything. If you make the familiar shape of a sentence, it will remind the reader of meaning. We take our reading cues from syntax, so when the words fill the right slots, we cannot help but shape them into sense and imagine the world they suggest.

The netsuke, he writes, is ‘a small, tough explosion of exactitude’ that ‘displaces a small part of the world around it’.

Rhythm is so basic to language that it does not need to be taught.

the English sentence belongs to everyone, not just those who like to police other people’s use of it.