BOOK BRIEF: To Debunk Strunk

Stanley Fish. How to Write a Sentence (and How to Read One). Harper Collins, 2011. 165 pages

Stanley Fish says we should not rely on The Elements of Style to write better sentences. 

And what serious writer or reader can find fault in such a claim? That revered book by William Strunk and E. B. White derived from Strunk's lecture notes when he was a Cornell University professor more than a century ago. A lot has changed in writing since those times. We have added some 100,000 words to our dictionary and even more meanings to existing words. Leading writers have twisted standard punctuation rules to fit their stylistic preferences. Technology too has transformed writing style, as tweet-like language increasingly pops up in what we previously considered formal writing. Globalism has also enabled us to appreciate varied syntactic formations, from Pilar's metaphrasing in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls to Yoda's anastrophic sentence structure in the Star Wars franchise.

In How to Write a Sentence, Fish searches for a deeper meaning, a more revealing nature of the sentence than we find in The Elements of Style, and he succeeds in explaining that this syntactic unit transcends a mere collection of varied parts of speech to provide what most language teachers simply call a complete thought. Great sentences, in fact, contain far more than one complete thought; they possess a veritable universe of images and ideas that each reader imagines based on unique experiences. Fish takes us through the rhetorical strategies of what he calls subordinating (hierarchical, causal, or temporal), additive (coordinating or cumulative), and satiric (ironic) style sentences from the likes of Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Elmore Leonard, Herman Melville, John Milton, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, Gertrude Stein, Booth Tarkington, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. 

Some readers may see the net effect of Fish's approach as an intensive academic and philosophical examination of the writer's form and content. But his sensible explanations of the composer's intent and execution are entertaining and educational.

Crazy Contronyms

Our language gives us plenty of opportunities to misspell words (e.g., affect-effect, principal-principle), and just as many chances to scratch our heads over the meaning of words. There is no better reminder of this dilemma than the contronym, also known as the auto-antonym. A contronym is a word with multiple meanings, two of which contradict each other. 

We can use rent to mean to grant possession of a property in return for a payment, or to pay periodically for the use of an owned property. So we can say, "If she offers to rent her house to him at a reasonable price, he will rent it." Another contronym, rock, can mean rooted firmly or moving steadily, as in "They are as solid as a rock because they never rock the boat." We can also use left to mean remain with or to depart from. Thus, it makes sense to say, "She left her money with me, so I left with her money." 

As new learners of English challenge us to explain such contradictions, we can only say with a smile, "You've got to get a feel for a language to execute it"—execute being yet another contronym.

Notes on Beginning (and Developing) Readers

What is the best way to learn and teach reading? An article, "At a Loss for Words" by Emily Hanford in APM Reports, well summarizes three main reading instruction strategies and their evolution: phonics, whole word, and three-cueing. Briefly, phonics is based on associating individual letters with sounds; whole word consists of recognizing entire words without sounding them out phonetically; and three-cueing relies on some guessing based on semantics (sentence context), syntax (sentence structure), and graphics (visual appearance).     

From all my own research as both a student and a teacher of reading, I’ve concluded that  are all useful. Here's why.

Phonics

Phonics is good for matching the letters of certain base words with sounds, such a girl and in, and the more sophisticated boy and out, which have diphthongs. But more than 25% of English words cannot be learned phonetically (e.g., though, tough). The famous example of the absurdity of English is spelling fish as ghoti:

·       gh as in tough

·       o as in women

·       ti as in nation

Whole Word

So the whole word approach is necessary to simply memorize words like the homophones bail and bale, mail and male, pail and pale, and sail and sale. At least there’s a pattern in those examples, but what about air and heir vs. fair and fare, or one and won vs. none and nun? What about poor vs. pour? And how did the rhyming words bed, lead, and said get their spelling? We likely recognize these whole words as young readers before learning rules like “when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking,” which, by the way, does not work for seven of the example words in the previous sentences.

Three-Cueing

The three-cueing approach makes perfect sense, as in these examples:

• Graphically: If I’ve learned cat and man, I’d have a good chance of learning mat and can based on the similarities of their appearance in print.
• Syntactically:  If I come across the sentence, I love Mother and don’t know Mother, even at age six I can guess that I love nouns, (i.e., people, places, or things), but it couldn’t possibly be that I love verbs (go), adjectives (pretty), adverbs (happily), prepositions (of), conjunctions (and) or interjections (wow). I don’t need to know the definitions of parts of speech to figure that one out. So if the story is about a girl and her mother, I could correctly guess the word is mother. Of course, by purely guessing, I might think the sentence says I love trains, an error similar to one that children have made when reading to me.
• Semantically: If I read I walk from school all the way to my house and knew every word but house, I could guess the word is not jail, sea, or zoo because of the limitations of what my six-year-old self can own.

But three-cueing was not so novel when Ken Goodman “created” it in 1967, as the article claims. In fact, he just repackaged the whole word approach, which required us to see things graphically, and syntactically, semantically.

One more thing we do: we read backwards as well as forward. Look at this passage from The Cat in the Hat:

“The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.” 

If I’ve just learned wet and cold, I’ll look back to their first sighting when I get to their second sighting. As a Dr. Seuss book veteran, I would know how the author depends on rhyming. So by the time I get to day, I’m sure it rhymes with play. And, if I’m really clever, I’ll know I sit in my house when it was too wet to play. So guessing, yes, but comparing and building on previous information too.

I’ll always remember in my doctoral program, a student pronounced paradigm as paradeem, not paradime, even though she heard the professor use the latter pronunciation in class. I thought either she did not connect his correct pronunciation with the word she came across in the assigned reading, or she wasn’t paying attention to his lecture. Then my thoughts shifted to when I learned that word only a few years earlier. I had never heard the word before until I read it in a book. The author was discussing Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, so I read that book next. Here’s the weird thing. I never had heard the word in speech; I only saw it in print, but I somehow correctly pronounced it in my head as paradime, dropping the g and giving the i a long sound, even though I had no other word ending to compare it with. So when my professor said paradigm, I knew how to spell it. I’d bet that the woman who mispronounced it was not as experienced a reader as I was. I think you get my point: we guess contextually more often than we think as readers.

A regular dose of all these approaches works for most children. Some will learn faster than others, as in everything else in life. But the slower ones will still learn. Yet having the right attitude is essential. The most memorable sentence in the article is the Molly Woodworth quote:  “[Reading] influences every aspect of your life." Let’s keep our eyes on the prize. Learn as much as you can about all three theories, draw your own conclusions, and read. 

Using—And Not Overusing—the Dash

The dash, which we use for emphasis or surprise, can still be seen as too dramatic in some industries and writing contexts. "The Em Dash That Divides" by Kate Mooney, a New York Times article (August 14, 2019) does a good job of explaining the differences between the em dash (—) and the en dash (–) and in suggesting reasons for using both. 

Thanks for bringing the article to my attention, Dr. Robert DiCuio.