What Is a Sentence?

Although some may consider this stating the obvious, isn’t any writing we do essentially a series of words on a page or screen, one after the other, that form sentences? Isn’t that what we do when we write—compose a series of words into sentences? As English scholar Stanley Fish writes in How to Write a Sentence (and How to Read One), “If you can write a sentence in which actors, actions, and objects are related to one another in time, space, mood desires, fears, causes, and effects, and if your specification of those relationships is delineated with a precision that communicates itself to your intended reader, you can, by extrapolation and expansion, write anything: a paragraph, an argument, an essay, a treatise, a novel” (8). At varying points in their writing process, all writers need to take care at the sentence level. So, exactly what is a sentence and what does it do?

TRY THIS to understand sentences. To illustrate what a sentence is, Fish presents the following exercise. Look around the room and pick out about five items or so and write them down. Next, add verbs, action words, (or auxiliary “helping” verbs). Lastly, make a sentence out of the words—nouns and verbs—adding other words as necessary. Here is Fish’s example: “My list is ‘pen,’ ‘chair,’ ‘garbage can,’ ‘printer,’ and [the modal auxiliary verb] ‘shall,’ and my first try at a sentence is ‘Before using the printer I shall remove the pen from the chair and throw it in the garbage can’” (16). Another sentence example he provides—using the same nouns and verbs is the following: “I shall move the garbage can so that I can pull the chair up to the printer and have access to my pen” (16). Fish goes on to provide more examples to show that the possibilities for various sentences from the same nouns and verbs are infinite. Now, you try, first re-reading the directions above as necessary. Then, look again at Fish’s examples above and compare them to your sentences. How are each of these sentences and not simply a random list of words? What do you think makes a sentence, well, a sentence?

Fish defines a sentence in the two following pronouncements:

(1) a sentence is an organization of items in the world, and

(2) a sentence is a structure of logical relationships. (16)

He explains the process of sentence creation like this, “Alone a word is just a word, a part of speech clustered in a category [like noun]; it looks over at other words it would like to have a relationship with (it’s almost a dating situation) but has no way of connecting with them. And then a verb shows up, providing a way of linking up noun to adjective, and suddenly you have a sentence, a proposition, a little world” (Fish 18).

In short, a sentence is a sentence, rather than a random list of words, because it organizes and relates those words to one another in order to make meaning.

While the possible sentences generated from the same nouns and verbs are infinite, the number of sentence patterns—or types of sentences—is countable. For example, Professors of English Martha Kolln and Robert Funk in Understanding English Grammar examine ten sentence patterns. Therefore, equally important to building sentences is identifying their structures. Fish provides the following examples of some sentences that follow the basic structure he calls “doer, doing, done to”:

Beautiful Joan sighed.

John was angry.

I am proud.

Crucial decisions await.

Simon bought the car.

The government raised taxes. (18)

TRY THIS to understand sentence parts. Drawing on the basic sentence structure doer, doing, done to (e.g. Janet walked the dog)—(1) read the really long sentence below and boil down it down to a complete sentence of only four words, (think who did what to what—what happened—in four words), and (2) explain how you think all of the other words (other than those four) are functioning in the sentence—what is their overall/general purpose (you could provide a specific example).

In the middle of the sixth inning of a crucial game in the pennant race, John, the league leader batting third, weakly but precisely hit on the nose the ball pitched with great velocity by the sure-to-be Hall of Fame hurler who had won his last five starts in an overwhelming fashion while going the whole nine innings and who therefore presented an intimidating image to anyone facing him, especially as the shadows lengthened over the mound, obscuring the mechanics of his delivery and rendering it difficult even to see the spheroid as it curved its sinuous way toward the plate, behind which were the umpire, ready to say “ball” or “strike,” and the catcher, prepared for whatever was about to happen. (Fish 23)

Did you find it—the four-word sentence? The point of this exercise is being able to spot the “structure of relationships that gives sense and coherence to verbal behemoths like this one” (Fish 24). In order to work with your sentences, it is essential that you can boil them down to their simplest structures to make sure your subjects and verbs agree, for example, as well as add further modifiers and other details, etc.

Be honest though, did you like Fish’s long sentence? Why or why not? There has to be something wrong with it, right? It has to be a run-on, you’re thinking. You may be wondering, is that a “good” sentence—is it correct? At this point, you can probably anticipate my response here. If we’re going to analyze or evaluate Fish’s long sentence—or any other—we have to consider it, along with every other aspect of writing, in context.