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How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One |  |
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How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One | |
New York Times Bestseller
“Both deeper and more democratic than The Elements of Style” – Adam Haslett, Financial Times
“A guided tour through some of the most beautiful, arresting sentences in the English language.” – Slate
“Like a long periodic sentence, this book rumbles along, gathers steam, shifts gears, and packs a wallop.”
—Roy Blount Jr.
In this entertaining and erudite New York Times bestseller, beloved professor Stanley Fish offers both sentence craft and sentence pleasure. Drawing on a wide range of great writers, from Philip Roth to Antonin Scalia to Jane Austen, How to Write a Sentence is much more than a writing manual—it is a spirited love letter to the written word, and a key to understanding how great writing works.
“Both deeper and more democratic than The Elements of Style.” (Financial Times)
“A guided tour through some of the most beautiful, arresting sentences in the English language.” (Slate)
“[Fish] shares his connoisseurship of the elegant sentence.” (The New Yorker)
“Stanley Fish just might be America’s most famous professor.” (BookPage)
“How to Write a Sentence is a compendium of syntactic gems—light reading for geeks.” (New York magazine)
“How to Write a Sentence isn’t merely a prescriptive guide to the craft of writing but a rich and layered exploration of language as an evolving cultural organism. It belongs not on the shelf of your home library but in your brain’s most deep-seated amphibian sensemaking underbelly.” (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings)
“[Fish’s] approach is genially experiential—a lifelong reader’s engagement whose amatory enthusiasm is an attempt to overthrow Strunk & White’s infamous insistences on grammar by rote.” (New York Observer)
“In this small feast of a book Stanley Fish displays his love of the English sentence. His connoisseurship is broad and deep, his examples are often breathtaking, and his analyses of how the masterpieces achieve their effects are acute and compelling.” (New Republic)
“A sentence is, in John Donne’s words, ‘a little world made cunningly,’ writes Fish. He’ll teach you the art.” (People)
“This splendid little volume describes how the shape of a sentence controls its meaning.” (Boston Globe)
“Like a long periodic sentence, this book rumbles along, gathers steam, shifts gears, and packs a wallop.” (Roy Blount Jr.)
“Language lovers will flock to this homage to great writing.” (Booklist)
“Fish is a personable and insightful guide with wide-ranging erudition and a lack of pretension.” (National Post)
“For both aspiring writer and eager reader, Fish’s insights into sentence construction and care are instructional, even inspirational.” (The Huffington Post)
“If you love language you’ll find something interesting, if not fascinating, in [How to Write a Sentence].” (CBSNews.com)
“[A] slender but potent volume. Fish, a distinguished law professor and literary theorist, is the anti-Strunk & White.” (The Globe and Mail)
“You’d get your money’s worth from the quotations alone…if you give this book the attention it so clearly deserves, you will be well rewarded.” (Washington Times)
“The fun comes from the examples cited throughout: John Updike, Jane Austen…all are cited throughout.” (Washington Post)
“How to Write a Sentence is the first step on the journey to the Promised Land of good writing.” (Saudi Gazette)
“How to Write a Sentence is a must read for aspiring writers and anyone who wants to deepen their appreciation of literature. If extraordinary sentences are like sports plays, Fish is the Vin Scully of great writing.” (Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, authors of "They Say/I Say")
“Coming up with all-or-nothing arguments is simply what Fish does; and, in a sense, one of his most important contributions to the study of literature is that temperament…Whether people like Fish or not, though, they tend to find him fascinating.” (The New Yorker)
STANLEY FISH is a professor of law at Florida International University in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University. He is the author of fourteen books, most recently Fugitive in Flight and Save the World on Your Own Time. He lives in Andes, New York, and New York City.
网友对How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One的评论
对英文有兴趣的朋友不妨都看看吧
A disappointment. This book starts out promisingly but then takes a nosedive, and the promise is never realized. And by the epilogue, the reader is no more able to write a decent sentence than when he first started reading.
If you need to learn how to write a sentence, look elsewhere: you won't learn it here.
Chapter two opens with a negative criticism of Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style." The criticism is unwarranted because it is totally misguided. "The Elements of Style" is a guide for college students, who need to write term papers and the like. What Mr. Fish proposes to teach is a literary style of writing sentences: a very specific aim that should be stated in the subtitle, but isn't. Mr. Fish has a different goal from what Strunk and White had, and that's why his criticism of them is unfair.
The analysis of sentences is, in this book, taken too far. It is too detailed to be of any use for the average person. Instead of enjoying the scenery of the forest, Mr. Fish takes us on a tour of the individual trees:
This tree here is angled at 75 degrees relative to the flat ground, and that signifies this and that. That other tree there is taller and rounder and is rooted in more elevated ground, and that means this, that, and the other. And the fact that that bird is perched on that slender branch changes the whole complexion of that tree. The tree without any birds perching on it is missing a certain quality that makes it bland; and hence ill-suited to birds vying for a love interest.
The above is not actually in the book; it's just my way of explaining what it's like to read Mr. Fish's super detailed analysis of sentences.
To be fair, this book has its uses: learning to write straightforward sentences is not one of them.
Let me analyze the above sentence the way (I think) Mr. Fish analyzes sentences in his book:
The sentence starts out with "to be fair"; it promises us that what follows will be either positive or at the very least balanced. And, indeed, the next part of the sentence fulfills its promise with "this book has its uses," a positive statement. The second half of the sentence starts with "learning", which connects with the previous part of the first half--learning is the "use" that is referred to in the second part of the first half; it promises us that we will be learning something; perhaps, something useful. The infinitive phrase "to write straightforward sentences" keeps us in suspense because we don't know how the sentence will end; it drags out the sentence to emphasize its final point. But then we encounter a "not" that shakes up the whole meaning of the statement. Finally, "one of them" refers back to "uses", and the whole meaning of the second half of the sentence has been reversed. The positive statement that we were expecting, is dangled in front of us, and we feel excitement and satisfaction, but then at the last moment it all gets taken away. And we are disappointed--and dissatisfied. We are propped up in the first half, only to be shot down in the second. What a reversal of fortune. That sentence makes a profound statement about life: about how we can be on top of the world one moment and at the bottom the next, about the uncertainty of life--about the vicissitudes and vagaries of life, about how we can fall precipitously in an instant--never to get up again.
Having said all of the above, I admit that Mr. Fish has great powers of literary analysis, something I can only dream of having. This book is okay. It would be better if, in it, he would teach us how to analyze the way he does; then maybe, we could truly learn how to write a sentence (and how to read one).
Half of this book is Fish "analyzing" his chosen sentences (usually he's just riffing on them in a superficially poetic but actually fluffy way), which he chooses just because he likes them. Not that there's anything wrong with him celebrating sentences he enjoys; it just seems more appropriate to include sentences that illustrate/enact key ideas in sentence-construction in a book that is supposed to be instructional. But I guess when he leaves those key ideas (e.g. subordinating style, additional style, "direction of lean") unexplained, he doesn't really have to provide clear and precise examples of them. For example, he defines sentences as "a structure of logical relationships," apparently forgetting that this description applies to propositions in natural language just as well as to, say, flowcharts or propositions in mathematics or musical phrases or pieces of architecture or photographs or, heck, DNA. Arguably, these are also kinds of language which can be divided into logical units, but they aren't the kind of language Fish wants to explicate.
The first few chapters are pretty good overall, mostly because he investigates issues of style vs. content, realism vs. formalism, etc., and explains efficiently why form is at lest as important as content, and that there's no such thing as "plain" or form-free language. That's about all this book is good for, although I guess maybe you could get more out of it if you're totally unversed in the art and science of deliberative sentence-construction, i.e. you're in Freshman Comp. In that case, though, the big takeaway for you will be the basic idea that sentences are way, way more complex than you thought they were and that their nuts and bolts (diction, grammar, etc.) can and must be carefully considered if you want to write well (and since you can't default to the aforementioned "plain" language, you have no choice but to consider them).
I have to be honest, I can't stand "How to" books. It is mostly because "How to" books almost always purport to teach you something that cannot be written down in a single book. However, sometimes they do get the job done. In my experience the best books of this genre are the ones that mix of practical advice with a general overview of a number of abstract concepts that will be helpful in digging deeper into the subject. I'm not sure this book accomplishes that. Based on the title I was expecting a book that teaches primarily how to write sentences while also learning how to read them.
Fish seems to suggest exercises but I don't really see any concrete explanations or examples on how to do them. It would have been a lot easier to understand if he formatted the sections differently. Perhaps adding a exercise section at the end of each chapter or labeling different concepts would have been helpful.
It was difficult for me to follow the organization of the book. His choice of topics for each chapter seemed arbitrary; I couldn't figure out how they fit into me learning how to write and read more effectively. I wasn't sure why I should follow his concepts and not someone else's. The chapters are portrayed as something you need to know in order to write and read effectively, but they come off as one person's preferences.
There are some good nuggets in this book, but I think if you're looking for what the main title suggests you will be disappointed. I wasn't expecting to finish this book as an expert on writing (if there is such a thing) but I figured it would give me at least a few good ideas of where to go next.
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