Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One ***

I enjoyed this slim volume for the opposite reason than I expected to. I expected to enjoy Fish's appreciation of finely crafted sentences more than his advice about writing, but his writing exercises are actually fun. Replace the nonsense words in Jabberwocky with good English words; transform a simple sentence into a hundred-word monster; pile on clauses to imitate the styles of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, or Philip Roth.

I was less impressed by his chosen example sentences and his literary analysis of them. His taste differs from mine, apparently. (Shouldn't be surprising, I suppose, given that his typical writing style is stereotypically academic.) I did appreciate his analysis of "the additive style," which I associate with Jose Saramago and his endless sentences.

Immediacy, not linear reflection leading to a conclusion, is the goal here, and to reach it [the author] must at once write sentences and somehow defeat the deferral of meaning -- the sense of building toward a completed thought -- that is the very nature of a sentence. Usually a sentence does not deliver its meaning until the end, and only at the end do its components acquire their significance and weight. But what [the author] wants is meaning to be present at every instant, to be always the same in weight and yet different as each word is different.