sentences
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The Very Short Story
In the Atlantic, Lydia Davis deconstructs two drafts of an early short story, showing how even something as minimal as a sentence or a paragraph can have a narrative arc.
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The Artful Sentence of Denis Johnson
Sentence construction. That’s all a writer does anyhow, right? Not all sentences are made with great care and hold sentiments like this one: There is something artful and sad in juxtaposing the certainty that something is wrong with the uncertainty…
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The Evolution of Language
How did humans learn to talk, anyway? Vervet monkeys use different words (or, at least, “different alarm calls to refer to different types of predators, such as snakes and leopards”) but don’t arrange them into diverse kinds of sentences. Songbirds,…