Can sentences be silent?
Exploring the meaning that lies beyond words
Sentences. That’s the theme for the Master the Art and Craft of Writing competition for June 2022. (See how I started with a one-word sentence there?)
Submit an entry and you could be the lucky winner of a $10 Amazon gift voucher. The first fifty entrants will receive a free copy of my forthcoming book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing, and every entrant will receive a free sampler of writing exercises. What do you have to lose?
And as this is both a contest and an opportunity to learn, let’s look at three things about sentences:
What, exactly, is a sentence?
How many types of sentences are there?
Is there an ideal length for a sentence?
Here goes!
What, exactly, is a sentence?
A sentence is a meaningful stand-alone thought - expressed through a variety of relationships between the knower and the known. A sentence has a subject (a reference to something - noun or pronoun that is known) and a predicate (a reference to a quality of being, a state, or an action that takes place through time - verb) to do with the subject.
A sentence differs from a clause in its stand-alone quality. Take ‘which hung above the world’. It’s not a question. It’s a statement. It has a subject (‘which’) and a predicate (‘hung’), but the ‘which’ refers to something that has been mentioned previously, but isn’t stated here. The group of words is meaningful, but it can’t stand on its own. It’s a clause, not a sentence.
Within that clause is a phrase: (‘above the world’). Again, the group of words is meaningful, but it has neither subject nor predicate, and the group definitely can’t stand on its own - it needs more information, more words around it for it to make sense.
How many types of sentences are there?
These days, sentences are generally thought to come in four basic types:
Statements (declarative sentences), e.g., ‘Fish swim’ or ‘Large, cumbersome fish swim through narrow channels with great difficulty.’
Questions (interrogative sentences), e.g., ‘Do fish swim?’ or ‘Can planets fly?’
Commands or orders (imperative sentences), e.g., ‘Get in the water now.’
Exclamations (exclamatory sentences), e.g., ‘Ugh! It’s cold!’
Previously, however, a fifth sentence type was distinguished:
Wishes or Prayers (optative sentences), e.g., ‘May we see each other very soon.’
And more recently, a sixth contender has been identified and should arguably be included:
The interrobang sentence, e.g., ‘He said what?!’
My own research into language draws on the work of George Spencer-Brown, author of Laws of Form, among other works. I explore how his work can reveal much that is new about how story stories in my forthcoming book, Story and Structure: A complete guide.
When applying his work to the analysis of sentence structures, I identified a further sentence type:
The awe-struck silence, e.g., ‘ .’
While, by definition, this sentence is never spoken out loud, it’s clearly linked to a state of mind which indicates a unique relationship that exists between the knower and the known. It’s distinct from all of the other sentence types, including the exclamation, which must be spoken.
It differs from all other sentence types in that it goes beyond words. And yet it is experienced and can be communicated. It can be described as a state of awe-struck wonder experienced as a direct result of becoming one with the ineffable mystery of being.
It can be described as a state of being speechless, of having no words to express the depth of feeling or perception a speaker has in their awareness.
Take these sequences in a storyboard about one of the great storytellers, Scheherezade, which features in Francis Glebas’ Directing the Story:
It encapsulates the experience Dante describes in the Divine Comedy, in the last Canto of Paradiso, where words failed him completely in his attempt to describe the ineffable vision of what he saw through and beyond ‘the ray of exalted light that in itself is true’ (33:52–63).
I hope you’ll find this illustration by the talented illustrator, Carol Michelon, which opens the section on Parts of Speech in my forthcoming book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing inspiring.
How will you include the unmarked state in your work?
How will you relate it to Carol Michelon’s illustration, above?
Your task is to write a short piece (100 words maximum) inspired by the illustration above by the talented illustrator, Carol Michelon, and in which you include all 7 sentence types described in this post.
Full rules here.
Deadline: Midnight on Wednesday 25th June 2022 BST
Upload your submissions here and share them on social media with the hashtags #unknownstoryteller #carolmichelon #leonconrad #artandcraftofwriting
This Course and Competition is part of The Unknown Storyteller project, focusing on the art and craft of how to tell a story, Master the Art and Craft of Writing is the counterpart to Story and Structure: A complete guide. The book explains how to structure the story you want to tell in the first place and will help you shape great stories to tell. It’s due out later this year, in the second half of 2022.
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