AN ALL-PURPOSE SENTENCE.

AN ALL-PURPOSE SENTENCE. I am a daily reader of RAB’s wonderful “You Knew what I Meant” blog about the process of learning to write well. I have become more aware of the temptation for a writer to search for impressive sentences. (Here is RAB’s discussion of this “Opening Sentence”: ““Graveyards are notorious for being a place full of death.”). I thought of this search for the sonorous sentence when I read Jackie Wullschlager’s review in the Financial Times (July 7-8) of Sheila Hale’s TITIAN, which the reviewer thinks will be the standard biography for the next 100 years. Wullschlager says: “Hale opens with a quotation from Edward Said that an artwork, “for all its irreducible individuality, is nevertheless a part—or, paradoxically, not a part—of the era in which it was produced.'” I posted here about Stanley Fish’s book recommending that student’s learn “how to write complex sentences by imitating master sentences.” It seems to me that Said’s phrase can be tailored to lend sonority to a discussion of almost any subject.