First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.
A sentence is a small, sealed vessel for holding meaning.
Joe Moran • First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.
In writing, meaning derives from just four things: syntax, word choice, punctuation and typography. These four things, in that order of importance, must stand in for the unique print of a human voice.
Joe Moran • First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.
Only later do we see that the world is not so easily pinned down, and that everything bleeds into everything else. For this we need verbs.
Joe Moran • First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.
a good sentence: a small explosion of exactitude.
Joe Moran • First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.
Rhythm is so basic to language that it does not need to be taught.
Joe Moran • First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.
A lamp am I, aware of your joy in bed: Do what you will, not one word will be said.
Joe Moran • First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.
We find pattern and symmetry pleasing in nature because it gives order and sense to the world.
Joe Moran • First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.
William of Occam, who held that ‘it is vain to do with more what can be done with less’.
Joe Moran • First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.
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.