A sentence is a miracle and a mystery.
A sentence is the way we move from making sounds to making sense, from naming to meaning. A sentence is the track from somewhere to somewhere else. It tells a story—of what is, of what happens, of who did what, of what is done. It carries a reader from silence to understanding, from nothing to something.
catchment. Namely, everything.The part serves the whole; it is what the whole comes down to.
Words alone or words laid out in no particular order mean something but not much: table banana on a the see I. Huh? I see a
banana on the table. Oh, I get it. A story is told; meaning arises. How does that happen? It happens because a writer or speaker puts words into an order in which we have learned to recognise a pattern of relationships and so can derive a meaning. It happens because of the innate human avidness for story, for relationship and causality. It happens because of the human gift for seeing and attributing meaning to patterns—and for storing and repeating them in mind and body and speech. We humans make sense of our life and the world we live it in by learning how things interact, what causes what. When we speak, we look to articulate patterns among our words that correspond to the way other physical forms and forces in the world interrelate: the way rivers fall and run; the way fish swim and where and how; the way trees respond when the wind blows; the way the whole water cycle works; the way the stars circle the sky; the way that the predator takes prey; the way every cause has its effect; the way every action has its actor, its object and its consequence.
What I’m trying to say is watch a predator (this hawk) hunt its prey (this antechinus) and what you see is a sentence. A fast one. Put a man and a woman who like the look of each other in a place together and what you’ll get pretty soon, among other things, is someone doing something; and someone doing it back; and two people doing something together. What you get is syntax. Sex; a relationship; perhaps issue. What you get is sentences performed— simple, compound, complex and compound–complex; fragments and exclamations.
But there may be no fathoming just how it is that sentences perform their alchemy and make meaning. One can learn the patterns by which this complex symbolic system, the sentence,
works; but how it came to that, and how it is we humans learn the code—that’s as mysterious still as the soul of a man or woman or the origins of the universe.You can understand the whole scheme of evolutionary history, without ever knowing why a deciduous beech or a black cockatoo moves exactly, and with such intelligence, as it does—why that is necessary and how it came to pass; you can understand everything about how grasses germinate, take root and grow, but never know just why they do and why that’s the way they do it. Language is another such lively mystery.
Since human lives depend upon sharing the kind of meanings language makes, we all start learning pretty early how to make sense. We do that by learning to make sentences, and we learn to make sentences by listening and mimicking patterns of sound, accompanied by gestures and emotions and consequences.
Just three months ago, my two-year-old boy, coming home with me from watching some horses race, pulling their buggies around a paceway, could say: ‘Horses racing buggies come-on’. Now he can say, ‘What do you think?’, ‘Daddy had to go away again’, ‘Mummy gone to work’, ‘Daddy gotta get up’, ‘That’s Mummy looking at the stephanotis’, ‘Henry getting tired now. He has to get his jamas on and go to bed’. He’s speaking in sentences (listen to their rhythm, by the way, for one of the joys of sentence-making is the making not just of meaning but music). Henry’s started making sense. He has begun to narrate his world and ours. He’s got hold of the mystery. It’s a miracle. It happens every day, somewhere, for we are languaging creatures, and this is a core skill.
When we get older and start to write, many of us lose the feel Henry has just acquired for syntax, the talent for spareness and rhythm in meaning-making, and we start making sentences that are hopelessly complex and attenuated. We lose sight (and sound) of what makes a sentence a sentence. When we do, our sentences, though they may still work, lose their life and their capacity to inform, let alone delight anyone, including ourselves.
Good sentences make good writing. And the more shapely and elegant one’s sentences are, the sounder they are structurally, the better one’s writing will be.
This chapter’s about how to make sentences that work; it’s about how to make sentences that are lean and clear and lively; and it’s about how to make different kinds, so that your paragraphs rock and roll. This chapter’s about syntax and sentence craft.
T RY T H I S
1 Do you remember the first sentence you spoke? Or the first sentence your child spoke? What was it?
2 Go to your window or door; in three sentences of different lengths, describe what you can see going on out there. 3 Write about your favourite boots or your favourite place
on earth. Again, concentrate on making sentences that vary in length and structure.