How to grip a reader (and how not to)

Fish, Stanley. How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One. New York: Harper, 2011.

Before I had finished, I knew this was a book I wouldn't write much about. In How to Write a Sentence, Stanley Fish describes the overall concept of a sentence without burdensome grammatical detail (something performs some action on something else), then goes through a few classifications of sentences with examples from his favorite literature. Problem is, I'm not a big fan of many of his favorites (especially droning passages from centuries-old writers), so I didn't learn too much. The only part I marked was the multi-clause sentence from Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which we actually did imitate with our own clumsy constructions in high school, much like the practice Fish recommends. (That first sentence? It's another of the imitations Fish suggests we could try, though I may have bungled it because I didn't go back and look.) It's not a bad book, especially read along with others in a concerted effort to improve one's writing, but not one I'll likely refer to again.

Rating: *1/2