Great Sentences

by Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo

Photo by Valeer Vandenbosch

What comprises a great sentence? How are they composed? What are the ingredients and the measure? The question of great sentences is a concept I’m going to begin to explore here regularly. Sometimes I will delve into the sentence and other times I will call upon the perspective of guest writers. We’ll talk about sentences we love—written by other authors or by our own hands. We’ll think about sentence structure, the very idea of sentence, cadence, syntax, grammar, breaking the rules.
 
The sentence can possess the power to astound. The imagery or the poetry of the language or the cutting precision of thought. It has been argued that the best writing is that wherein the reader is neither aware of the writer nor the words. While I believe that is sometimes true, I also disagree. I love gorgeous and lush language when I can feel the roundness or flatness, heaviness or lightness of the words. I also love spare and succinct language. I think the best sentences are those in which every word is necessary—be it five words or one hundred.

“That quick her train caught her up over her arm she ran out of the mirror like a cloud, her veil swirling in long glints her heels brittle and fast clutching her dress onto her shoulder with the other hand, running out of the mirror the smells roses roses the voice that breathed o’er Eden.” (The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner) This is probably the most memorable sentence I have ever read. It floors me very time. The cadence and the emotion. I read The Sound and the Fury for the first time when I was about twenty and I have returned to this book, and especially this single sentence, many times since, for inspiration or to just bask in the beauty of those words.

Great sentences are those that capture you with the beauty of the language but also carry you away to somewhere specific—a particular sentiment or place the author intended. “The light went out the door when she pulled it to.” (Nathan Coulter, Wendell Berry) Or, “Beyond the glass the sea lay pale as milk, pale the sky, scratched and scribbled with cloud welts.” (The Shipping News, Annie Proulx)

But it’s not merely the individual words, it’s the sum of the parts. The effect of the combination of the words. In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard speaks of the sentence: “When you write you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it and it digs a path you follow.” It’s less a matter of an advanced vocabulary and more a sense of how words work together to create a sentiment. The words, juxtaposed, settle into their meaning, burgeoned, buttressed one by the other, building meaning. Word relationships that extract meaning one from the other, building, but are luminous in their individuality in their precise place in the sentence.
 
There is a lot to think about when discussing the sentence. Don’t underestimate its singular power. Try these exercises and see what emerges: 
Write an entire story in one sentence. Or write a character sketch that embodies a character in one sentence.

What do you think makes a great sentence?

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