Think before you write

This is a sentence. As is this — not an exceptionally beautiful one, but a sentence all the same, just telling you what it needs to tell you, just getting on with things, doing its job. Sentences are everyday, functional things, ubiquitous and unappreciated. And Joe Moran thinks it’s about time we started noticing them.

First You Write a Sentence is an often impassioned attempt to get us to take sentences seriously. Moran is interested in how they work — in how written language works, in construction and effect — and in sentences’ function as carefully assembled units of communication. That ‘carefully’ is especially important. Sentences are everywhere, formed without much attention and used without much thought, but Moran wants to encourage an alertness to their construction.

Some of the book’s most compelling sections seem indeed to be about this very thing: not about nouns and verbs, or monosyllables and vowel sounds, but about care. Moran is advocating attentiveness, deliberateness, absorbedness, slow and studied craft, pushing against ‘the glib articulacy of a distracted age’. Sentences are — they should be — ‘a gift’. Clarity is important, but this doesn’t mean characterlessness, or charmlessness.

Most popular

Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

There’s plenty in Moran’s book to delight grammar and language nerds, too, of course. He argues eloquently for fresh metaphors, and for monosyllables, especially when used by Tyndale. He rhapsodises on the pleasures of a long sentence expertly unspooled. And he wants more subjunctives, fewer conjunctive adverbs, and much less schwa. Oh, and nominalisations are very bad, too! (Good tip: always avoid an excess of nouniness.) He champions verbs, while encouraging only sparing use of ‘to be’ and the passive voice.

But — crucially — this argument is not made dogmatically, because there is a right time for nouns and for the passive voice and for polysyllables (‘this argument is not made dogmatically’), and for breaking any rules that need to be broken, because what really matters is that you think about what you’re doing, and you don’t make your sentences without due care.