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

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.

These sentences were semantically surreal but syntactically flawless. Racter could sort its stack of words into a dry parody of scholarly method. This dissertation will show that the love of a man and a woman is not the love of steak and lettuce. Or it could work up a tone that nestled somewhere between flirtation and insult. I was thinking as you

The purest form of love is just caring – paying someone else the compliment of your curiosity and holding them in your head, if only for a moment. The purest form of praise is to pay attention.

A classic way to do this is time, manner and place. It is there in Old English, in the stout sentences of the tenth-century monk-scholar Aelfric, which say what someone did, when, how and where:

‘Attention,’ wrote the French thinker Simone Weil, ‘is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ Give your sentences that courtesy and they will repay you.

Stick to time, manner and place and your sentence will never seem cluttered. For you will be relaying an unbroken action in the world of linear time and three-dimensional space within which all of us are stuck. In the early hours I took off my shoes and crept into the spare room. That night I slept fitfully on an inflatable bed. The next day I rose

words are the world’s gift to us all, as free as light and air.

Amid these gaps, implications sit.

Donald Barthelme’s story ‘Sentence’, itself a 2,000-word sentence, ends with an affirmation of this infinitely supple power: