Building a Sentence, Step by Step

Photo by Dmitry Shamis on Unsplash

You know what excites me? Crafting sentences that overflow with content and brim with alluring vocabulary. When I read Stanley Fish’s book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, I became giddy with pleasure, thinking about all the future memorable sentences I could write. In one chapter, Fish demonstrates how to expand a four-word basic sentence into one that reveals character, moves the plot, and illustrates how the setting affects a story. Let me show you what he suggests with my own example.

My basic four-word sentence is: her brother went to the meeting.

Now, if I want to build the character of the brother, I must say something about him. Here’s my first addition: her brother, a tall and lanky 56-year-old with a cantankerous and rude demeanor. But I could say even more. Here goes: her brother, a tall and lanky 56-year-old with a cantankerous and rude demeanor who always arrived twenty minutes late to every appointment and made excuses for his tardiness. Now, the reader knows that this guy is unpleasant and too arrogant to take responsibility for his short-comings.

Next, let me tackle how he went to the meeting. I replace the verb “went” with a more exact one and add some related information: her brother, a tall and lanky 56-year-old with a cantankerous and rude demeanor, who always arrived twenty minutes late to every appointment and made excuses for his tardiness, rolled his wheelchair across the snow-packed sidewalk in thirty-degree weather, wearing a down jacket, gloves, wool hat, and earmuffs. Not only does this addition explain how he got to the meeting, but under what conditions. It also infers that he was determined to go since driving a wheelchair over the snow in freezing weather is tough.

Ok, home stretch here. Let’s finish by adding something about the meeting: her brother, a tall and lanky 56-year-old with a cantankerous and rude demeanor, who always arrived twenty minutes late to every appointment and made excuses for his tardiness, rolled his wheelchair across the snow-packed sidewalk in thirty-degree weather, wearing a down jacket, gloves, wool hat, and earmuffs, to get to his AA meeting. Whoa, I only added one more word, here, but a term full of meaning and content. Now, the reader might associate the brother’s tetchy deportment with his alcohol problem that he is struggling to overcome.

I like this sentence so much I’m going to paste it on the bottom of this post, so I can admire it. Happy sentence-crafting to you, too.

Her brother, a tall and lanky 56-year-old with a cantankerous and rude demeanor, who always arrived twenty minutes late to every appointment and made excuses for his tardiness, rolled his wheelchair across the snow-packed sidewalk in thirty-degree weather-wearing a down jacket, gloves, wool hat, and earmuffs-to get to his
AA meeting.

by Tess Perko

Reference: Fish, Stanley. How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. Harper. 2005.