content and form are the same thing, that what a sentence says is how it says it, and vice versa.

Stick to time, manner and place and your sentence will never seem cluttered. For you will be relaying an unbroken action in the world of linear time and three-dimensional space within which all of us are stuck. In the early hours I took off my shoes and crept into the spare room. That night I slept fitfully on an inflatable bed. The next day I rose

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

Some stains can be removed only by the destruction of the material itself.

I write maybe three and a half thousand sentences a year.

A classic way to do this is time, manner and place. It is there in Old English, in the stout sentences of the tenth-century monk-scholar Aelfric, which say what someone did, when, how and where:

Yesterday’s bread has less moisture and so makes crisper toast.

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.

Amid these gaps, implications sit.