How to Write a Sentence

What Hacker News says

1. cbfrenchSep 2026
   It’s good—better than the much-revered Elements of Style, imho, which is overly prescriptive and frankly unhelpful at turns, even if it’s well written.

   But my all-time favorite is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. It illustrates the variety of English sentence structures in an ordered way with a plethora of examples. The approach is not prescriptive; rather, it allows you inductively to develop a feel for the syntactical rhythms of the language.

   Also, I love Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. It’s a lovely, entertaining little book, filled with Fish’s insights as an eminent literary critic. What I appreciate most about the book is that Fish walks you through a number of examples and explains how and why they work, so you can walk away as both a better writer and a better reader.

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2. buzzcutFeb 2014
   This is built on so many bad assumptions. At best the "rules" it's trying to enforce are training-wheel rules, the sorts of rules given to novice writers to help them avoid flabby, purple writing.

   But the assumption that short sentences are better than long sentences, or that simple sentences are better than complex sentences is just wrong. There are all kinds of reasons why you might use one type of sentence over the other or vary them for effect. You might be concerned about rhythm, or you might be attempting to establish a certain tone, distance, closeness, formality, or lack of.

   We have this weird cultural obsession with the clarity, brevity, and simpleness of writing. Jacques Barzun even wrote a writing manual called Simple and Direct, as if these are the only virtues to be found in writing.

   But I think you want as many tools as possible to achieve the effects you want. There is a huge rich tradition here, that we've largely lost, a tradition that teaches about hypotactic and paratactic sentences, that teaches about periodic and loose sentences, that teaches how to make left and right branching sentences, that teaches subordination, that teaches rhetorical devices, and that advocates (at times) longer, more complex sentences for richer and denser writing.

   Thankfully there are a number of books out (some of them) recently that seem to be fighting back against the austerity view of writing.

   They include, if you're interested: - Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences - Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence - Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences, Syntax as Style - Richard Lanham, Analyzing Prose

   I'd just add, there is nothing wrong with being simple and clear. There is nothing wrong with cutting out needless or weak adverbs. But there is something wrong with worshiping the austerity style as, at all times, the best and the only way to go. There are lots and lots of reasons and occasions to deviate from it, but the style orthodoxy these days is the one assumed by that (admittedly cool) website.

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3. eliseheinJan 2013
   I think beginning an academic or a research paper with a question or something like "Some people say..." or "Recently" or "Nowadays" is often a very good strategy even though it might be clichéd, because telling the reader exactly what is going to follow in the text is very much expected. When I read with the sole intention of finding a specific piece of knowledge, I want to be able to tell from the introduction (or the abstract) whether I will find that piece of knowledge in the given text.

   That being said, I think all other kinds of texts should be as story-like as possible, in the sense that they should be gripping and interesting from the very first sentence -- I want to be a little bit lost and not know where exactly the writer is taking me. In this case, I really like the idea of jumping straight into a scenario (or anecdote), I remember having been suggested by my teachers in middle school to do so. Having opened the text with a scenario, you can also use it in the conclusion to wrap things up and let the reader know how the story ended, given the conclusions reached in the body of the text.

   My book recommendation is "How to write a sentence (and how to read one)", http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/01/27/how-to-wri... It has whole chapters on both first and last sentences.

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