III: SENTENCES AS COMPLETE THOUGHTS
At the risk of being read
out of the profession, I shall maintain that the ancient "rule" that a
sentence is "a group of words expressing a complete thought" is a perfectly
reasonable statement,
providing that we are referring to a written group of
words. All of our fifty decent sentences are
complete thoughts because they
are punctuated as complete thoughts. When a writer puts a period
at the end
of a group of words, he has completed whatever thought he was expressing. It is
the
writer, not the reader or the grammarian or the epistemologist, who
determines when his thought is
complete for him. The thought may be
dumb,irrelevant, weird, or even "thoughtless," but he is
expressing it as he
likes and ending its expression when he wants to. The writer is master of his
own thoughts. I labor the point because I want the writer reading this book
to accept his privileges
and his responsibilities in the matter of the style
and thought of his sentences. In every sentence he
writes, he must make and
has the opportunity to make countless choices.
The distinction
between the spoken and the written thought is a crucial one. Sentences
according to
my definition exist only in written form. Listen to ordinary
speech and try to determine where the
sentences begin and end. You may find
some "periods" in impromptu speech that seem like the
written word in
sentence form, but spoken English characteristically is a string of sounds with
no
clear beginnings or ends. When this string of sounds is translated to
letters and separate words,
these graphic representations must be subjected
to the code of punctuation.
E-mail and comments to: Arnold Nelson
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