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might also consider for a moment an assignment a student of ours, Sean Heron, gave to a class of high school students he was student-teaching during a unit on the Civil War. He asked students to paraphrase three times the following sentence: “The South left the country.” His goal, he reported, was to get them to see that “because language is open to interpretation, and history is conveyed through language, history must also be open to interpretation.” Use paraphrase × 3 to figure out how Sean’s sentence slants history.

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5. IDENTIFYING THE “GO TO” SENTENCE

Every writer has a “go to” sentence, a characteristic way of putting things. With a little practice, you can learn to spot writers’ “go to” sentences. These can reveal a lot about how the writer thinks and the ways he or she approaches the world.

Once you’ve acquired some of the specialized vocabulary of grammar and style, you will be able to see the shapes of sentences more easily and to understand what those shapes tell you about both the writer and his or her point of view on the subject at hand. But you don’t need a lot of specialized vocabulary to begin; this exercise is based on careful description. (To acquire the terms and concepts you need, see Chapter 18, The Rhetoric of the Sentence and The Glossary of Grammatical Terms at the end of Chapter 19.)

Step 1: Select a single characteristic sentence from your own writing or from a reading—a sentence shape that repeats frequently or at certain habitual spots (such as the beginnings or ends of paragraphs).

Step 2: Describe the structure of the sentence: its basic shape. Identify what you think are the sentence’s most distinctive features.

Step 3: Decide how this particular sentence shape reveals tendencies of the way the writer thinks. Consider sentence structure, word order, kinds of words, etc.

Discussion All of us have “go to” sentences that we fall back on in daily life—in speaking as well as writing. It is illuminating (and fun) to try to become aware of these. Our choice of sentence shapes is influenced by how we tend to think, but the shape we go to also varies according to the subjects we are writing and talking about and the rhetorical situation in which we are doing so.

A sentence is the shape thought takes. That is a mantra already offered in the discussions of grammar and style in Chapter 1, and it bears repeating. The particular ways of ordering words that each of us habitually goes to are actually features of who we are; our “go to” sentences embody how we characteristically respond to the world.

Some Examples of “Go To” Sentences

For example, if a person’s “go to” sentence takes the form “Not only x, but y,” he or she is inclined to define things thoroughly by contrasting what something is with what it is not. A person who says “I am not unhappy” is a person who wishes to avoid blunt claims and prefers subtler descriptions of mental states. A person who is not unhappy differs from a person who is happy and willing to say so. Note, by the way, how little technical vocabulary you actually need to talk about the shape and effect of these sentences.

Here’s another example: “Although x, the fact is that y,”

Although the President raised the number of troops in Afghanistan, the fact is that he presented a timetable for complete troop withdrawal.

Although the show Cupcake Wars on the Food Network decadently panders to pop culture, the fact is that I cannot watch it without wanting to bake cupcakes.

With this sentence type, some technical vocabulary would help. The sentence begins with what is known as a subordinate or dependent clause. Subordination usually indicates a desire to qualify (put limits on) one’s claims. The use of the phrase “the fact is” in the second half of the sentence, the independent clause, indicates a less qualified and more certain way of thinking. This is an interesting tension between the two halves of the sentence and thus the two different ways of thinking they suggest.

Here’s one more example, taken from a student’s memoir, of how sentence