All lovers of language should read this book.

Sometime last year Chris Howell remarked in passing that undergraduates should have to spend an entire course learning how to write a sentence. At the time I was teaching some of the very undergrads he was talking about, and even though I agreed that they needed a deeper understanding of language and the funny little ideas sloshing around in their brains, I was hesitant to go off the deep end of the grammar pool. That is until I read Stanley Fish’s new book, How to Write a Sentence, and How to Read One.

First, a disclaimer: I, unlike some of my friends and many of my students, was immersed in grammar instruction both in high school and for an entire year of college linguistics. I remember diagramming sentences in tenth grade English. I know how to use commas and a lot of the parts of speech, although I still get confused by simple verb tenses like present participle. (Isn’t that like “I am eating strawberries”? See, I get confused.) And these moments of confusion about the “taxonomy,” as Fish calls it, of language worry me. Does this mean I’m not a real writer because I can’t remember what an appositive is or the difference between that and a prepositional phrase? But I feel like I’m pretty good at understanding the relationships between words and phrases and how they can be put together to make an interesting unit of thought.

And that’s the basic philosophy behind Fish’s book:

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My tenure at Willow Springs will be up in June, when issue 66 hits the stands, and then I’ll have to pass the reins to my awesome assistant and find a new job. So, I’ve been looking into opportunities that involve writing. Going across different media involves various challenges. For example, how does one write for news? We all know that you keep it in iambic pentameter, and use human interest stories to get the viewer’s attention. I’ve been looking at structure lately, and found a couple excellent examples:

Of course, my fifth grade teacher always said, “You’ve got to answer the five W’s.” Where is the bullshit and who’s dealing with it? When the bullshit happen? Is the bullshit actually breaking news? Keep it current. Why is the bullshit happening and how are we dealing with the bullshit? What do authorities think of the bullshit?

That all sounds simple enough. And remember to write the bullshit in the old inverted pyramid: start with the most important facts about the bullshit and expand from there. Keep the bullshit objective. Don’t get flowery when talking about bullshit. Give your bullshit an angle.

If you’re writing bullshit for the television, images are super important. And yes, there’s a formula for selecting and filling in the video: