Can you tell me a bit about yourself? At what point in your career did you see a demand for a book about the importance of crafting a perfect sentence?
I’ve written a lot of different kinds of writing over the years: academic papers and books, books for a more general readership, and journalism. The thing that seems to unite all these kinds of writing is that the sentence is crucial. Most writers, when they discuss writing, talk about the sentence as the basic element, the little widget they make in their workshop of words.
I also teach English in a university, and it has convinced me that sentences are both the key to good writing and the key to good reading. Almost everything is written in sentences – even poems, where there is often an interesting tension between the line and metre and the underlying sentence structure. So understanding how sentences work is the key to both good writing and attentive reading – and being an attentive reader of sentences helps you to be a good writer of them.
How important do you think the sentence is when it comes to writing a book? Do plot and character not take centre stage?
Plot and character – or, more generally, the subject matter of the book – are obviously important. Quite often, though, I think readers care more than they even notice about the shape and feel of a book’s sentences. They’re obviously reading the book for what it’s about, but they’re also responding to how the book feels and sounds in their head: to the sentences, in other words. I find it quite hard to get through a book, even if the subject matter is very compelling, when the sentences are boring.
It sounds so simple to say that a good piece of writing can be reduced to the quality and structures of its sentences, but in practice this is actually much harder to execute, and writers often fall just short of communicating what they intended. Why do you think this is?
Writing is essentially an artificial activity. Most human civilisations throughout history have managed without writing anything down. It’s a very strange thing to do: to make marks on a page or screen that can then be seen by someone else in your absence. It is also hard. The main reason that writing fails is that the writer thinks they have said something that they haven’t actually said. Part of us imagines that we will be looking over the reader’s shoulder as they read, explaining what we really meant. We won’t. The words have to stand all on their own.
What makes a “good” sentence, and what makes a “bad” one? And is the way this is “decided” down to basic rules of English grammar, personal taste, or how well we feel it flows and communicates? Who has the authority to decide this? Does it go back to something innate and natural within us, or is it not quite as abstract as that?
I’m not a linguist by training, and I prefer to think it less in terms of formal grammatical correctness and more as a matter of ear: the way that sentences breathe and move and sing. Obviously, like taste in music, this will always be partly subjective. A “bad” sentence is just one that confuses the reader or places an unnecessary burden on their short-term memory. A sentence should confuse the reader as little as possible. Grammatical rules are just agreed ways of cutting down on the potential confusion.
Hearing or reading a “bad” sentence could be as jarring as hearing a bum note in an otherwise beautiful concerto. Is there any science behind that?
There is an area of neuroscience called human sentence processing, where they scan the brains of volunteers, using nodes strapped to their heads, to see how they read a sentence and where they get confused. Linguists have a term, “garden path sentences”, for when a sentence leads a reader up the garden path and gives them the wrong idea of what it’s about. A sentence jars when we feel we’re being led up the garden path. It also jars when we feel it’s using more words than it needs to – when there is unnecessary repetition for instance.
What will participants of your sentence-writing masterclasses come away knowing or feeling?
I hope that, in a short space of time and without overburdening people with technical terms, I can teach them something about the mechanics of good sentences in a way that will be useful to them, however experienced they are as writers. I hope they will come away with a clearer idea of how sentences work, and excited about writing their own sentences.
Do you have three quick tips for creating a strong sentence, or even recognising a “bad” one?
First, identify the subject and the main verb and think of that as the kernel around which you build the sentence. At heart a sentence is just a noun and a verb. That is its beating heart, and if you get that right then everything else tends to follow on.
Second, think of the full stop as the goal towards which the words in the sentence move. The full stop is they key punctuation mark and often the only punctuation you need. The sentence should end with a strong stress to mark the closure of the full stop.
Third, vary the length of your sentences. This varies the cadences of your writing and gives them music and rhythm.
Joe Moran will be leading our sell-out masterclass, How to write good sentences: The key to becoming a great writer in October. Tickets for February are available now.
