Stanley Fish’s book dives into how sentences communicate. The styles examined invite us to consider the construction of meaning in our own life narratives.
Stanley Fish’s “How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One” is an in-depth examination of how sentences convey meaning through form, style, and content. He focuses primarily on “how” a sentences conveys meaning (form and style) and “what” meanings sentences convey (content).
Upon noting the interconnectedness of the two, he briefly takes us into an exploration of “why” sentences exist in “TEN: Sentences That Are About Themselves (Aren’t They All?)” when he considers sentences that tightly intertwine “how” and “what” without giving priority to one or the other, but we won’t delve into that today.
How Sentences Convey Meaning 🔗
Fish suggests that sentences can focus on form and style (how) before content (what). The careful examination and practice of the form of the sentence’s construction will allow us—the readers—to be able to construct our own sentences when the need arises.
As for style, while innumerable, Fish focuses on three: subordinating, additive, and satiric.
The Subordinating Style 🔗
The subordinating style ranks, orders, and sequences things, persons, and events and “strongly suggests a world where control is the imperative and everything is in its proper place.”
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice”
The Additive Style 🔗
The additive style gives the impression of speech or thought “haphazardly tumbling out of the mouth or the thoughts of a writer who is not worrying about getting every particular just right.”
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was life, and how my parents were occupied and all before they have me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
J.D. Salinger, “Catcher in the Rye”
The Satiric Style 🔗
(He notes is more of a thematic category.) Writers who employ the satiric style “want to harpoon persons, parties, or society as a whole.”
Memoirs are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering, which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feel perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.
Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”
Authoring Our Lives 🔗
Fish’s rhetorical theory can be applied not just to the reading and writing of sentences, but also to the reading and writing of our lives. (Note that I am not talking specifically about reading and writing memoirs or autobiographies: those are physical manifestations of what I think we are all doing, all the time.) Just consider how you might tell someone about your experience of the day so far, your last birthday, or the most recent interaction with another person.
How you share your stories with others is a reflection of how you’ve perceived and then constructed your experiences in the narrative of your life.
We might tend to understand the events in our life through Fish’s three styles:
- seeking to order events through time, causation, or importance (the subordinating style),
- letting things happen as they may, feeling little or no agency in how our lives unfold (the additive style), or
- where we structure our lives around the criticism of our surroundings (the satiric style/thematic category).
Viewed through Fish’s three styles, I have found that my own construction of reality and the way I construct sentences tend heavily toward the subordinating style, with a splash of the additive style when I am overwhelmed by the responsibilities of free will.
Do you notice a trend in your own constructed narratives and writing style? What are the implications for your sense of agency in your own life?
What Sentences Say 🔗
Fish observes that some sentences can be taken out of their contexts and their form and style can be examined for how they convey meaning, but other sentences require that we “take account of the substantive concerns that led to their being written.” First and last sentences of novels, he notes, are “obvious instances; a first sentence is the preface to something, to a set of propositions or to an unfolding idea … and a last sentence is the conclusion or coda to that same something.”
Fish’s interest in first and last sentences is an important distinction that we can apply to the experience of our lives. What might you consider the first sentence in your constructed understanding of your life? Does it have to do with your birth? Does it have to do with your first job? Your first experience dating? Consider that we might have multiple first sentences and multiple constructed understandings of our life as a series or web of connected selves (romantic self, community self, moral self, bodily self, etc.).
Now, consider, what will your last sentence be? Quitting your job? Leaving this world better than when you entered it? Making no mark at all? Sounds depressing, I know, but it’s what I’ve been grappling with.
What is my last sentence if the trajectory of my current construction of self and identity doesn’t change? What do I want my last sentence to be?
Then, the follow-up questions:
Is there a gap between what I think my last sentence will be and what I hope what my last sentence will be? What can I do to close the gap?
Reading material across many genres (i.e. interdisciplinary studies) can help us understand and construct the self. I read in order to explore/find/create meaning in life, and a book about sentences applies to both writing and living my life.
Changelog 🔗
- 2023-10-04: Changed title back to the book’s title. Moved to book reviews/notes.
- 2021-03-14: Changed title “How to Write Your Life and How to Read It” to “How to Read and Write Your Life.” Semantic formatting. Light editing to bring the content into the present. Added a description.
- 2017-07-29: Created.
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