Understanding the Essence of a Sentence

No one can agree on what a sentence is. The safest definition is typographic. A sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop – except that some start with quote marks, and some end with question or exclamation marks, so that doesn’t quite work. Let’s try again. A sentence is the largest domain over which the rules of grammar have dominion. Thus it stands grammatically apart from the sentences around it. Except when it is a fragment that hangs over from the last sentence as an after-thought. Or that briefly sets a scene, like every sentence of the shipping forecast. Occasional gales. Fog patches. Mainly moderate.

A sentence is a small, sealed vessel for holding meaning. It delivers some news – an assertion, command or question – about the world. Every sentence needs a subject, which is a noun or noun phrase, and a predicate, which is just the bit of the sentence that isn’t the subject and that must have a main verb. The subject is usually (but not always) what the sentence is about and the predicate is usually (but not always) what happens to the subject or what it is. This [subject] is a sentence [predicate]. A sentence must have a subject and a main verb, except when it leaves out one or both of them because their presence is implied. OK?

A sentence can be a single word, or it can stretch into infinity, because more words can be piled on to a main clause forever. The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal wrote a whole novel (Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age) containing just one sentence.

Skilled writers write in sentences – not because sentences are what we all write in (although they are), but because they write small. They see the sentence as the ur-unit, the granular element that must be got right or nothing will be right. Their books, however long they become, are gatherings of sentences. Scientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków analysed more than a hundred classic works by authors such as Dickens, Joyce and Beckett, and found that the sentences behaved like a mathematical multifractal: a structure whose smallest part resembles its whole. The best writing is self-consistent. It sounds as if it comes from the same breathing body standing in the same place, rather as wine from a certain terroir is said to have, from its climate and soil, a taste irreplicable anywhere else. What special terroir makes a piece of writing irreplicable? Its sentences.

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 that too, perhaps. A skilled reader can spot it from a single sentence flashing by.

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. When John Betjeman began a BBC radio talk with the sentence ‘We came to Looe by unimportant lanes’, he must have known it sounded better than ‘We drove to Looe via the minor roads. His version is ten syllables with the stress on each second syllable: a perfect iambic pentameter.

Some writers map their sentences metrically, marking the stressed and unstressed syllables with scansion marks as if notating a musical score. Some even work out the stresses before they fill in the words. The rest of us just have a foggy sense that a sentence needs an extra beat. But we still know that a sentence is not just what it says but how it says it. Robert Frost called this its sound of sense’, the emotional truth you could grasp even if you heard the sentence spoken by a muffled voice in another room. Here, he felt, beneath the mere grammatical obedience, were the brute tones of our human throat that may once have been all our meaning.

Rookie sentence writers are often too busy worrying about the something they are trying to say to worry enough about how that something looks and sounds. They look straight past the words into the meaning that they have strong-armed into them. They fasten on content and forget about form – forgetting that content and form are the same thing, that what a sentence says is how it says it, and vice versa.

Rhythm is so basic to language that it does not need to be taught. You can correct a child’s syntax and pronunciation, but if they have no feel for the rhythms of speech, they will not sound human. The rhythm of English stresses certain syllables within each word and certain words within each sentence. It makes us linger on nouns, adjectives and verbs and skip lightly over pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions. Hence we will never love the automated sentences of satnavs and public address systems, with their random rise and fall.

Rhythm is the song of life. The syllabic stress patterns of speech sync up with the heartbeat we hear in the womb, the pulses of air in the lungs, the strides of walking and running.

Beating a rhythm is our first music, the joyous reflex that makes us tap feet, drum fingers and clap hands. To the young man carrying a pair of battered drumsticks everywhere in his back pocket, or the musicians of remote tribes who commandeer a river as a drum kit, their hands working up pops and thuds on the water as beatboxers do with their voices, the rhythmic urge must be obeyed. The music critic lan Penman, writing about Grace Jones, called rhythm ‘song’s manacle and its demonic charge.. the original breath… the whisper of unremitting demand.

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

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