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.
