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A Conversation with Stanley Fish (Including “How to Write a Sentence”)

I am glad that Albert Mohler gave up his radio program. The program had value in itself, but he is now freed up—it seems to me—to do what he does best: have uninterrupted one-on-one conversations with serious thinkers. Along with the Ken Myers’s Mars Hill Audio program, Mohler’s Thinking in Public podcast is becoming a great resource for eavesdropping on intelligent conversation about first things.

His latest was a conversation with Stanley Fish, where they talk in part about Christians in the public sphere and the battle for ideas, along with issues like academic freedom.

But Professor Fish is also the author of a new book: How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One.

Here is part of their exchange about the book:

Mohler: Your new book is entitled How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. I have to tell you I found reading this an absolute delight. It’s very different than anything at least I have found that you have written before. It’s really a celebration of the power of the sentence and a very fascinating tour through English literature.

Fish: Yes it is. It’s actually two books which I tried to bring together. One is as suggested by the title, How to Write a Sentence: an account of how sentences work and why sentences fall apart, and what kind of exercises that you might perform that would put you in better command of the structure of sentences. There, my key statement is that “a sentence is a structure of logical relationships,” and I spend some time trying to explain exactly what that means. But I start also from the very beginning illustrating the grammatical or craft points I’m making . . . by some very nice and indeed great sentences. And at a certain point of the book the formal instruction recedes—never quite goes away, but recedes from the foreground. And the immense pleasure of encountering absolutely stupendously great sentences you can marvel at in the same way you marvel at a high level athletic performance, that then takes center stage. And the book begins to, as it were, ride on the tracks of these absolutely amazing authors who can do things with the very same language that you and I use every day that you and I would never be capable of doing.

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