Bad grammar is usually a sign of something deeper amiss with the rhythm. More can go awry in a sentence than syntactical exactitude. Worse than the words being wrongly arranged is putting them in an order that neither moves nor sings. The sentence just limps and wheezes along to its sad end with a tuneless clank. When the writer has a tin ear for the sound of a sentence then the reader knows, just as when she hears flat or pitchy singing, that something is wrong, even if she can’t quite say why.
Pleasing patterns play upon the brain’s circuitry in ways that benefit the human tribe. We find pattern and symmetry pleasing in nature because it gives order and sense to the world. A palate finds pleasure in food as nerve endings find pleasure in sex. The pleasure they give profits the gene pool.
Caring about how a sentence slots together can feel like a lonely and rarefied occupation. But Aaron Altman was right: it is worth the time it takes. Making a sentence sing is a way of making others more likely to listen and ourselves more likely to be understood. A good sentence gives order to our thoughts and takes us out of our solitudes. It is a cure, however fleeting, for human loneliness and for the chronic gulf of incomprehension that divides writer and reader, just as it divides any two of us.
Only human beings – for now, at least – make sentences. Like being able to make fire, or throw straight and true, or fall in love, no other animal can do it or wants to. Perhaps it all began, as Richard Dawkins has speculated, as a piece of brain software for collating our thoughts, which we later externalized as speech and then, eventually, writing. Whatever the cause, somewhere deep in our ancestral past we gained this knack for making sentences.
A sushi master may make his apprentices wait years before they even touch the sushi. First they must sweep floors, learn to use their knives, and watch. Then they might just be allowed to dry some seaweed or massage an octopus until it is tender. A bonsai apprentice spends many seasons watering and feeding a tree before being permitted to prune it. An apprentice in shodo (calligraphy) takes years getting to know her bamboo-handled brushes, working over the top of her master’s examples and perfecting her line – all for that moment when she consigns a few swift strokes to a hanging scroll.
What the Japanese call shokunin katagi, the artisanal spirit, is about much more than skill. It bears the social obligation to make something for the joy of making it, quietly and beauti-fully. It invests the simplest daily acts with artistry, whether it be making tea, raking Shirakawa gravel in a garden or curating that work of art and lunch that is a bento box. The point of life is to infuse the quotidian with the pleasure of creation and the pursuit of perfection.
The art of sentence craft seems ideally suited to this artisanal spirit. In a sentence, precision and grace go together. What matters is getting the little things right, for only through mastering these menial tasks do we find order and beauty. We learn to arrange and rearrange elements so that they fall just right on the eye of the beholder. And we discover the importance of begin-nings, middles and endings. When Japanese children are taught to bow, they are told to punctuate the action with shape and meaning by pausing at the lowest point before coming back up.
The Japanese turn life into art by making it a series of these short, graceful, self-contained gestures – like embodied and enacted sentences.
There is no virtue in volume, no benefit in bulk. The world has plenty of sentences already, so pause before you add to the pile. Most of us, when we write, march too quickly on to the next sen-tence. To write intelligibly is hard enough, so be sure you have done that first. Fix your sights on making one sane, sound, serviceable sentence. As a farmer must do, hold your nerve and resist the impulse to put your energies into cash crops with quick returns. Have the confidence to leave fields fallow, to wait patiently for the grain to grow and to bear with the dry seasons.
Writing on a computer has a pretend polish, a deceiving veneer of finality. As soon as you type, it looks neatly justified, nattily formatted and halfway to being published. And that is even before the program has tidied up your spelling, spotted what it thinks are sentence fragments, scored your writing for ‘readabil-ity’ and told you, with blithe, uninformed confidence, that you are done. Spelling and grammar check complete. You’re good to go! Whatever its underlying condition, an onscreen sentence will scrub up as the finished article, like a smelly man in a sharp suit.
When you really wrestle with a sentence, and consider all the ways it can go wrong, you see that writing even a single one is a leap in the dark, with no assurance that it will land in a place that lets it make sense to someone else. Writing a sentence is slow and laborious whichever way you come at it. So laborsaving devices – like those salad tossers and egg slicers that claim to speed things up but actually just litter your kitchen – don’t help much.
Source : First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life by Joe Moran
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38470061-first-you-write-a-sentence
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