Good sentences don’t make good writing
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Tell me: Which of the sentences below is a good sentence?
“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”
[Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960]
“It was October 23, 2008.”
[Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise, 2012]
“Why are there so many robots in fiction, but none in real life?”
[Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, 1997]
“I am ten years old and I know every crack, bone and crevice in the crumbling sidewalk running up and down Randolph Street, my street.”
[Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run, 2016]
“Too often, the word rhetoric implies empty words, manipulation, deception, or persuasion at any cost.”
[Cheryl Glenn, The New Harbrace Guide, 2018]
“Not long ago we attended a talk at an academic conference where the speaker’s central claim seemed to be that a certain sociologist — call him Dr. X — had done very good work in a number of areas of the discipline.”
[Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, They Say/I Say, 2017]
“On the fifteenth of May, in the Jungle of Nool, In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool, He was splashing . . . enjoying the jungle’s great joy . . . When Horton the elephant heard a small noise.”
[Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who! 1954]
“Written genres have been described in metaphors as seemingly contrary as straitjackets and playgrounds, tools and life forms, institutions and constellations.”
[Christine M. Tardy, Beyond Convention, 2016)
“One of the most central notions in this book is that of a formal system.”
[Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, 1979]
Each of these sentences is the first sentence (after prefaces and introductions) of a book sitting on a bookshelf in my study.
And each is a good sentence.
Of course, you say. They’re all written by professionals, published authors. So of course they’re good sentences. I’d be happy to write sentences like that.
