Free How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish Page A

connectives “and,” “or,” and “but,” each of which signals a new turn or detour and all of which conspire to keep the reader—mockingly referred to as “my dear friend and companion”—off-balance. The message is either keep up with me or keep quiet.
    J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield does not even pretend to be solicitous of his reader. His opening sentence announces that whatever the reader might want, he’s not going to get it. Holden refuses to begin at the beginning and “tell you my whole goddamn autobiography or anything.” (The dismissiveness of “or anything” is a thing of insolent beauty.)
    If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
    The sentence lists the information it won’t provide, stringing the items it will withhold on a bead of ands—none of that and none of that and none of that either. The art of the sentence consists in its ability to convey two voices: the breathless, unrehearsed voice of the teenager and the reflective, quasi-philosophical voice of the author. When Holden throws out “lousy” he intends nothing more than a contemptuous filler (today a teenage narrator might say “f ******”), but Salinger wants to raise the questions of just what kind of childhood his young hero had. In Holden’s mind, “if you want to know the truth” is a throwaway that means “I don’t care what you want,” but Salinger is telling us that the truth of his novel will not be the David Copperfield kind (“To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born [as I have been informed and believe] on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night”). It will be something else, and that something else will not be revealed by dates and orderly sequences.
    Catcher in the Rye not only exhibits but is about the continuous and unpredictable stream of experience in relation to which clean, formal demarcations, either in life or in prose, are artificial impositions. Later in the book, Holden recalls why he flunked Oral Expression; he couldn’t stomach the instructor’s insistence that speakers not digress from a stated point. “The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses,” and he illustrates his preferred style of speaking (and thinking) with the speech of a boy who got a D-plus because he said he was going to talk about his father’s farm, but then:
    What he did was, Richard Kinsella, he’d start telling you all about that stuff—then all of a sudden he’d start telling you about this letter his mother got from his uncle, and how his uncle got polio and all when he was forty-two years old, how he wouldn’t let anybody come to see him in the hospital because he didn’t want anybody to see him with a brace on.
    Richard’s style is associative, as is the style of the sentence that recalls his performance and mimes it. “Then,” “all of a sudden,” “how”—these are classic paratactic connectives; they just get you from one piece of prose to the next without insisting on the priority or superior importance of any of them. Holden pronounces the effect “ nice ” and elaborates: “It’s nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father’s farm, and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle.” Just go with the flow, either in life or in writing; don’t stop to put events and objects in ordered relationships to one another.
    The great modern theorist of the additive, or coordinating, style is Gertrude Stein, who explains in an amazing sentence why she doesn’t employ punctuation that carves reality into manageable units of completed and organized thought:
    When I first began writing I felt that writing