From the Editor’s Desk: What is a Sentence and How to Write Better Ones?

I am a great believer in the basics. Foundational rules of grammar and syntax are not, in my view, limits to our self-expression but rather the laboratory in which greater experiments in self-expression can be conducted. One doesn’t become a jazz master, brilliantly creating in the moment, by playing notes arbitrarily and at random. One becomes a master of the notes by endlessly practicing the scales, and in so doing seeing relations of notes to each other that no one had discovered before. So it is with writing. If you struggle to improvise, to innovate, to get a good flow flowing, it may be because you struggle with your sentences. Let’s start there:

What is a sentence? At its most elemental, a sentence is simply a thing, doing or being something else. A sentence is, in other words, a noun and a verb: something doing or being. The man sits. The woman reads. Those are both perfectly acceptable sentences that would be at home in a book or a story. You can add information to a sentence to make it more interesting, as when The boy kicks the ball. In this case, the “ball” is a direct object, the thing being acted upon. But that is not important for us at the moment. For now, notice simply The boy kicks. That is the heart of your sentence.
 
The two essential parts of your sentence must be in numerical agreement, i.e., singular or plural. If “A man sits,” then “The men sit.” If “A woman reads,” then “The women read.” Your verb must be aligned (conjugated) to the number of subjects (nouns) doing the action. Nothing will throw your reader off the track faster than subjects and verbs that do not align. If this is a difficulty in your writing, it’s because you periodically lose track of who or what, exactly, the subject of your sentence is. It is not correct to say “The brigade stacked their arms,” even though we know in our mind that a brigade consists of many soldiers. A brigade is a singular unit. Therefore it is correct to observe that “The brigade stacked its arms.”  If you want to say “When the brigade advanced, many of them started to fall,” this is also incorrect. However the fix is simple: “When the soldiers of the brigade advanced, many began to fall.” In this case I have simply, and subtly, shifted the subject from the singular “brigade” to the plural “soldiers.” Easy!
 
Keep track of you’re the structure of your sentences. Too many subjects or too many verbs not properly compounded to each other will result in run-on sentences or sentence fragments, both of which are deadly flow killers.
 
My favorite book on sentences is Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence. It’s a short, little book with a passion for creative, inventive sentences. Fish shows how to develop a sentence, adding tension and contrast to heighten readers’ interest. Note that even an elaborate, poetic, and lyrical sentence knows of what it consists: a noun and a verb. One of the most beautiful sentences in the English language, Fitzgerald’s conclusion to The Great Gatsby, offers this tragic reflection: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” It has metaphor, lyricism, contrast, and symbolism. Fish offers a wonderful reflection on why the sentence works so well. But notice at its heart, if you strip away the poetry and the metaphor (“boats”), it is a very simple noun and verb: “We beat on.” That doesn’t work alone, but it is the scaffolding on which the rest of the sentence is layered.
 
Young writers often get lost or confused in their sentences because they lose track of who or what is the doer, and what, exactly, is being done. If you keep those two things in your mind as you work to fashion ever-more creative and innovative sentences, your work will always stay grounded and you’ll more readily achieve the flow you are after. There is much more to be said about how to craft an effective sentence, but for now: identify your subject and your verb and you’re well on your way.

--David J. Snyder