It was September 28, 1960, in Fenway Park. Ted Williams, one of the greatest hitters of all time, came to the plate in the eighth inning. It was his last at-bat. He was retiring. The Red Sox bomber, at age 42, faced a 1-1 pitch that he blasted for a career-ending home run, memorialized by a local sportswriter: “It was in the books while it was still in the air.”[i] That is a good sentence!
Alison Roman of the New York Times recently wrote about her favorite lamb ragout, which she likes to make on cold February days: “This recipe is a… very lamby, tomatoey sauce that tastes like how a good sweater feels.” That is a good sentence!
Hemmingway, in A Movable Feast, told us that he would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think to himself, “Do not worry. All you have to do is write one true sentence and go on from there.” It’s not that easy!
We learn about sentences early in our school years. We start with easy three word sentences: “See Jane run. See Spot run.” We go on from there. The lucky ones among us had a Miss Clark in the 12th grade to help us hone our writing, sharpen our sentence structure, whittle away the redundancies. Nevertheless, we tended to be a bit mechanical.
In college, we met Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style,[ii] filled with rules about proper grammar and good writing. Stanley Fish[iii] commented that Strunk’s “Little Book” was for people who already knew the mechanics of writing, of which there are few anymore.
Lawyers need to write mechanically so that they can say, precisely, what is is. Essay writers need their first sentence to be a “hook” that pulls the reader further into the subject matter. Book authors need to create first chapters that seduce the reader to see what chapter two has to offer. It’s about good writing, not mechanics.
I came across a new term the other day that I had never heard of before: Countersinking, also known as “expositional redundancy.” An example is that I had never heard of before in the previous sentence. The author of the article used this sentence as an example: “We need to hide,” she said, asking him to seek cover. Reducing redundancy produces “We need to hide, she said. I had a professor that taught us to edit our work with three simple words: cut, cut, cut. I wasn’t very good at it.
Truth be told, expositional redundancy served me well over the years. When asked to write a 500-word essay on who-knows-what, it always seemed that the 500 words were more important than the content.
Churchill spent hours writing and editing each segment of a speech, choosing each word carefully, looking for impact, for shortness, for clarity. I heard that he said something to the effect that if you wanted him to give a two-hour speech he was ready. But, if you wanted him to make a two-minute extemporaneous comment, he would need a week to prepare it. With that kind of consideration to his every word, his every sentence, he kept the enemy at bay, kept his nation and the world focused on victory at any price, and led the Allies to end a world war.
The Gunning Fog Index, one of the many tools that measure effective writing, suggests that most authors should aim for an eighth grade level of writing. I ran this piece through the index; it rated at 7th grade. It doesn’t like three syllable words; too complex for the average reader, it claims. Syllable and average are too complex? Enemy, victory and other simple words are too complex. Really!
The struggle, the quest for a well-constructed sentence, continues. It will never end, I suppose because there will always be expositional redundancy, like extra words and mixed metaphors. Many sentences just won’t grab the reader.
The concluding sentences of a tract should summarize, restate, or punctuate the points made in the body of the article. I’m going to work on that as soon as I master, or at least feel comfortable about writing good first sentences. If I can hook the reader with the first sentence, they might stay with me to this point!
