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

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

To clothe despair in eloquence is to show that it can be endured.

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.

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.

Having only minor gifts has its compensations. It has forced me to think hard about how words join up and why some sentences work better than others. A nightingale has no idea why such a bewitching noise emerges from its throat; a human nightingale impersonator must parse every note.

William of Occam, who held that ‘it is vain to do with more what can be done with less’.

Amid these gaps, implications sit.

A sentence is more than its meaning. It is a line of words where logic and lyric meet – a piece of both sense and sound, even if that sound is heard only in the head. Things often thought to be peculiar to poetry – metre, rhythm, music – are there in prose as well, or should be.

sentence, too, should rely more on quality ingredients than baroque artifice.

Birdwatchers swear they can spot a bird from its jizz. The word’s origins are unknown, but some think it derives from aircraft reconnaissance in wartime and is short for ‘general impression, size and shape’. A bird’s jizz means that a skilled birder can tell you the breed even if it is just a blur flying past in the dusk. A writer’s voice is like t