Reading as a Teacher
Dear Reader,
Today’s piece was inspired by my return visit to Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. My return was occasioned by a friend of mine who is teaching a new course this fall, and as I was compiling some suggestions for her, I was reminded of this book.
When you’re reading as a teacher—and here I use the word broadly to included corporate lecturers, teachers, and tutors alike—you’re hunting for one of at least three things: things that inspire you to teach better, things that will inspire your students, and things that will your students’ latent gifts.
For today, I’ll focus mostly on the third of those I’ve listed.
In 2011, the very year How to Write a Sentence came out, I was hunting for more resources for my already-varied set of students. At least a quarter of my students were international students, And maybe half of those spoke anything but broken English and read in English at anything even approaching a high school level. I also had quite a number of students who came from inner-city schools and were similarly reading below a high-school grade level. Both sets of students were juniors and seniors—and they were college bound. (I had quite a few other students who struggled with reading who were not from these backgrounds, I should note.)
It is in part from these struggling students that my keen interests in late-term literacy were born. They were also subject to my early experimentation. And that experimentation was based in a few things: readings in the extensive K-8 literacy research (well, it’s extensive K-6, substantial 7-8) and readings in books for mature readers and writers.
That said, my interest in reading Fish’s book was more for the writing claim in its title than the reading comprehension claim. On the front cover there is a blurb about the book offering this declaration, “deeper and more democratic than The Elements of Style.” And so I bought a copy.
I’ll review How to Write a Sentence’s claims about besting The Elements of Style in the next section, but the surprise turn of the book is that it offers far more for the reading of sentences than it does for the writing of them.
For those who’ve suffered under my tutelage before, the torturous examination of one of Alexis de Tocqueville’s essays might remain in memory. That exercise originated with my very first student in Wisconsin, though I’d already worked with hundreds of students by that point. (For my present students who’ve yet to encounter that little exercise, never fear, it’s in your nearer futures.)
I mention the de Tocqueville exercise because it involves a granular look at the individual sentences in a rather convoluted and near-archaic text, at least in the translation I use. That exercise of modeled rhetorical analysis did more to accelerate my students’ reading comprehension than anything else I incorporated into my instruction. Frankly, it probably still does, though I save de Tocqueville himself for later on in the tutoring process than I used to.
Fish’s little guide echoed the insight I’d already gathered from experience: narrow analysis of a selection of individually intricate and interesting sentences could be a way of improving reading comprehension—a way that also met a rather important criteria: it could be squeezed into the limited time I had to be effective with students.
I was already mid-development with my reading comprehension app, QuotEd Reading Comprehension, when I started Fish’s book. I was thus grateful for the encouragement that my gamble was supported by something other than my own research, however much I trusted it. (It wasn’t until the app almost ready for release that I found additional supporting research from Stanford University School of Education and other academic sources. So even though those resources didn’t even remotely inspire my app-building efforts, I was glad to have such well-regarded backing to my project. There is value in that paper even if you don’t support the CCSS. In reading that specific paper, though, I must admit that I was reading it as much as an eager entrepreneur for potential marketing as I was for its educational value.)
Fish’s book, then, gave me a complementary resource to what had been formerly the product of my own observations alone—and Fish was and is a renowned teacher, which are far better credentials than I can claim. The analysis of an idiosyncratic set of sentences—chapters on additive and satiric sentences; first and last sentences—paralleled my own work, but I’d be completely churlish to suggest I didn’t benefit from Fish’s insights. And the collection of sentences alone was worth the read (and the structure was so much more pleasant than I found in Quotology, a tedious book I was almost compelled to read given my app’s premise…).
Even though Fish’s book is a guided tour through exercises I’ve used myself—a tour with a better selection of sample texts than I could have compiled—his guidance isn’t useful for anyone but the writing-devoted. I’d hoped in this re-read to find my decade-old evaluation of its merits incorrect. Instead, I found my reservations confirmed: the book has some pedagogical benefit for teachers, but little classroom application.
As classroom application was what I was reading it for—whether it might inspire students’ latent gifts in either writing or reading—How to Write a Sentence didn’t fit those purposes.
A Brief Review of How to Write a Sentence
A mere paragraph into his second chapter, Stanley Fish offers this bit of acerbity on the classic The Elements of Style: “In short, Strunk and White’s advice assumes a level of knowledge and understanding only some of their readers will have attained; the vocabulary they confidently offer is itself in need of an analysis and explanation they do not provide.”
Well then.
Fish goes on to claim that a taxonomy of grammar isn’t helpful to students, but a taxonomy of sentence forms possesses more promise. On this point, perhaps.
But Fish’s difficulty is that his own forms are inaccessible as he writes them. The first time I read his book, I was not the least of readers. I also knew every word in the Strunk and White. And I vividly recall having to look up no fewer than ten words on my first read through of Fish’s book.
TEN. From he who had written the quote above. My response wasn’t embarrassment. It was irritation. What a navel-gazing hypocrite! My irritation on that point remains. Here are three words and expressions that appear, undefined, on only the second page of his book: ordained, ligatures, and “mot juste.”
I realize those aren’t as bad as “meretricious,” a word I swear appears in every chapter. (Okay, it doesn’t, but it’s repeated.) Even so, woof. Page two and we’re encountering ligatures?
(I am glad to say that I didn’t require any lookups upon my re-read, so I guess I’ve learned at least ten words in the past decade.)
It isn’t until page 16 that Fish gets around to his “bottom line” and defines what he means by the word “sentence,” which seems a rather delayed definition since he’s already midway through Chapter Two. It’s another misstep in his oft-frustrating presentation. I mean, I’m all for using whatever vocabulary and register you like, but then don’t go around comparing your book favorably to the Strunk and White if your book is, in fact, worse on that score.
This is why Fish’s book is one of the most readable unreadable books I’ve encountered. If you’re already a skilled reader, it’s a pleasant enough little romp through the world of great sentences—at least ones Fish finds great. If you’re not already a skilled reader, Fish’s book presents a tangled mess of disconnected oddities and uneven flow. That is, Fish hasn’t written a book for the regular reader—he’s written only for the word nerds. This is fine so far as it goes, but it doesn’t teach novice writers how to write a sentence. Unlike The Elements of Style, Fish’s book is too hard for anyone but the already dexterous to get into—and even were it not too hard, it’s not inviting for anyone but the cognoscenti.
That’s why I couldn’t wholeheartedly recommend his book to my teacher friend. Fish’s book almost provides a great resource on sentence analysis and sentence crafting. It just fails in all sorts of weird ways.
Those critiques named, Fish’s book is filled with insights on reading as a writer:
“So it is with writing: the practice of analyzing and imitating sentences is also the practice of learning how to read them with informed appreciation.”
That’s a sentence I can agree with. It’s too bad his book impedes that practice for all but the already initiated. Still, his book is filled with such agreeable moments.
I continue to revel in his trenchant commentary on the supposed technical prowess of those who can quote a grammar manual to you chapter and verse (I have been one of these people): “Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding.” Thus I can coach students to perfect SAT and ACT writing scores, and yet those students cannot craft a coherent paragraph to save their lives. Those students don’t read writing manuals as writers: they read them for points and reap their just reward.
Fish notes the inherently defeasible nature of writing advice when he states “that is why examples, not rules, are what learning to write requires,” though he somewhat glosses over the possibility that many “rules” are assembled from a collection of examples.
One of his better pieces of advice comes at the end of the chapter titled “How to Write a Good Sentence,” concluding: “In short, pick your effect, figure out what you want to do, and then figure out how to do it.”
In the sixth chapter, Fish offers this rather enjoyable definition of the essay:
The word “essay” means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression the prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable. Rather than indicating the logical progression of thought, connectives such as “thus” and “so” are just place markers; “but” and “and” are the words that carry the experience forward, the first signaling a thought going in a new direction, the second saying “and, oh, this has just occurred to me.”
That definition isn’t quite on the level of historian Simon Schama’s under-read essay on essaying—“It was George Orwell’s golden-eyed toad that made me a writer”—but it has a clarifying nature on connectives like “thus” that other pieces on essays sometimes neglect to mention in passing.
Were Fish’s book filled with moments like its attempt to define “essay,” the book would be exceptional. As it makes boasts it does not measure up to, the book lands ambivalently, strengths and weaknesses abounding and nestling beside each other.
As a concluding note, it was Fish’s wife, Jane Tompkins, who came up with the subtitle And How to Read One, a point of emphasis that the book handles better than its main title. It’s the sort of book that can enliven one’s own literary and rhetorical analysis, but you’d best be a determined reader.
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh
P.S. Yes, this is a bit delayed. I had a draft of this that was absent much of the personal narrative. But I lost that draft via the vicissitudes of technological “advancement.” I can’t say I’m thrilled by that occurrence. It was a little easier to write this version narratively, and thus that’s what we’re left with!