Joe Moran’s essay on writing well suggests that his forthcoming book is a great read. It’s called First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Joe Moran on Writing Well”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
If you care about writing well, and of course you do because you’re listening to our show, I want you to hide yourself to the nearest bookstore or library and pick up a copy of a new book by Joe Moran.
It’s called First You Write a Sentence, The Elements of Reading, Writing, and Life. Joe Moran is a professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University in England. And the reason that I’m so excited about getting this book, which I don’t have yet, but I know I’m going to love it, is that I read an essay that he wrote in The Guardian. It may be adapted from the book, I’m not sure, but just a taste of this prose made me want to get this book immediately.
He’s talking in the essay about how to write the perfect sentence, and it’s really pretty close to a perfect essay. Let me just share a little bit of it. He says, a good sentence imposes a logic on the world’s weirdness. It gets its power from the tension between the ease of its phrasing and the shock of its thought slid cleanly into the mind. A sentence, as it proceeds, is a pairing away of options. Each added word, because of the English language’s dependence on word order, reduces the writer’s alternatives and narrows the reader’s expectations.
But even up to the last word, the writer has choices and can throw in a curveball. A sentence can begin in one place and end in another galaxy without breaking a single syntactic rule. The poet Wayne Kestenbaum calls it organizing lava, this pleasure to be got from pushing a sentence in the wrong direction without altering its sweet grammatical composure.
Oh, I love it. Isn’t that gorgeous? Sweet grammatical composure. Isn’t that great? That book, again, is First You Write a Sentence, The Elements of Reading, Writing, and Life by Joe Moran.
If you’ve got a book you’d like to share with us, something you think we should all read, let us know, 877-929-9673. Email us at words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.
