Humor by John Christmann
A Life Sentence
I have been thinking about writing sentences lately. This is not, as you might expect, because I write this column. But because after twenty-eight years, my children’s English teacher is retiring. This is the woman responsible for teaching all of my children how to write sentences.
Complete sentences. Structured sentences. Vibrant sentences. Beautiful sentences.
Sentences with more than two words.
I am thinking about sentences because this teacher introduced my kids to something she called Stretch Sentences. These were homework assignments in which students had to write creative, extended sentences using their weekly vocabulary words. For example: Write a well-developed, stretched interrogative sentence using three vocabulary words.
“What’s a well-developed, interrogative sentence?” my son asked.
“That is.” I told him.
“What is?”
“Yes, that is too, but I think you need you need a few more vocabulary words.”
And then he asked his mom for help.
When my older son was in her class he liked to push the boundaries of these writing exercises. When the assignment read Write an imperative sentence using at least three of your vocabulary words, he would scribble back in barely-legible script Write an imperative sentence using the words homework, shortcut, and risky.
Now, as a teenager, he writes persuasive critiques on the shortcomings of writers like William Shakespeare.
Before my children started writing Stretch Sentences in fourth grade, I had no idea there were so many different kinds. Declarative, Imperative, Interrogative, just to name a few.
When I was growing up, there was only one kind of sentence—Avoidative—and I did all I could to bypass writing assignments in school. Even in college I successfully managed to curtail my written word output. I enrolled in a class appropriately titled, English for Engineers.
The course description was short and to the point: This class is for engineering majors who need to fulfill their English requirement.
I think I was struck by the elegance of the sentence, so I enrolled. I was lucky to get in. It was popular course among uncommunicative engineers like me.
But I learned two things. One, never end a sentence in a preposition. And two, it is useful to know an English major who can identify mysterious parts of speech like “prepositions”.
Later in life I learned to write with a little more clarity after an extensive report I drafted came back from my hot-headed boss with the one-word sentence Incomprehensible! scribbled across the top. She didn’t even bother to mark it up, which was surprising given that she was an English major.
Of course, as an engineer, I naturally questioned her reading ability. After that I had a lot more time to reflect on the concept of appropriate sentence structure.
All of this got me thinking about sentences. So I did a little research.
The shortest sentence by most accounts is Go. The longest sentence, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is a 4,391 word gem written by James Joyce in his masterpiece, Ulysses. I tried to read Ulysses once, but I fell asleep reading the title.
Other married jokesters claim the longest sentence in the world is really, I do.
I also discovered that, as a side project to the Human Genome Project, a supercomputer has been programmed to generate perfect sentences using models as varied as The Bible and William Shakespeare. Here is one: Zounds! Three fish equal one cubit.
I am not certain, but I think several of these programmers were in my English for Engineers class in college.
Personally, a perfect sentence to me is one that is easy to read. Which lately, only requires big print.
But here is what I have been thinking. A really good teacher makes us think outside of class, long after the teaching is gone and we are on our own in the world. And the Fourth Grade English teacher who set my children on the road to written communication didn’t just teach my children how to construct a good sentence. She taught them to think about it.
And, I guess, she taught me too.
So, as a juggler of sentences, this presents me with a unique dilemma. Because it seems to me that such an important teacher deserves an important sentence in tribute, a sentence without double meaning, a sentence without pointless vocabulary words or redundant thoughts or extensive compound predicates, a sentence that doesn’t reference itself with cleverness or stretch for great lengths with the liberal use of commas, a sentence that stands by itself in truth, clarity, brevity, and beauty.
What she deserves is a perfect sentence without a measurement of fish.
As soon as I think of one, I will let you know . . .
Thank you!
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