The Beautiful Sentence

A post by Tony Grooms

Photo by Fabio Santaniello Bruun on Unsplash

My friend declared that beautiful sentences were what she considered most important when evaluating a work of fiction. She said she put less emphasis on structure, or even character. If the sentences were not only well constructed, but beautiful, then the work won her highest approval.

I, too, quotidian as I am, love a well-made, even a sentence that could be called beautiful—though beauty, we all know is in the eye of the beholder. My friend went on describing the book we were discussing as having sentences that sparkled. And as I read them, I agreed—there was a “sparkle” to the language—that is to say, it was language that was both exacting in its observations and lyrical, that is to say poetic, in its delivery.

But what indeed makes a beautiful sentence—or even just a good sentence? Are there objective criteria that can be utilized, or is it all just the je n'sais quoi of artistic experience—that amorphous alchemy between artist and reader? And even so, do beautiful sentences by themselves make successful narratives? Perhaps it is all just the luck of the draw—writers are just primates, after all, blindly striking at keyboards. Speak for yourself!

A number of good books on writing prescribe for good sentences. Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style is as viable today as it was when first published in 1918. A favorite of mine is Theodore Cheney’s Getting The Words Right. You can find many others that instruct on how to write clear, well-organized sentences. Among their advice is to favor active constructions, action verbs, concrete nouns, accurate diction, a spare use of modifiers, and directness, among other practices of good style. Cheney bends his book toward creative writers, while Shrunk and White’s is for academic and journalistic writers.

A clear sentence, in the grammatical sense, is just a baseline for beauty. Sentences rarely stand alone, and so a part of what makes them beautiful or not is how they function in the context of other sentences—how they convey or do not convey the author’s purpose. A clean sentence that creates a non-sequitur confuses and so fails to be beautiful—or clear. Cheney devotes a long discussion to organization, not just making good sentences but sentences that work well with other good sentences. Still none of this is necessarily what I—or my friend—would call beautiful writing. It is no more beautiful than the average news article, which I assert should be clear—but definitely not beautiful.

Beautiful writing, I think, is reserved for literary writers who need to convey not just clarity, but also emotion in both subtle and complex ways. Often emotion in a sentence is not stated, but implied. It can be implied by diction, by figures of speech, by the juxtaposition of words, by the use of punctuation, and importantly by rhythm. The introduction of these techniques pushes the prose sentence into the realm of the poetic stich.

Indeed, I’ve recently read several books, mostly by debut authors, who heighten their sentences by adopting poetic devices such as catalog, repetition, alliteration, and anaphora. They make interesting, if not beautiful sentences, however, I offer three caveats: Even with poetic devices, an unclear sentence is a dud; Overuse of poetic devices dulls the reader’s sense of delight, and weighs down the prose; the rhythm created by the devices, especially catalog, has to do more than create a rhetorical flourish—it must also push along the narrative, that is it must develop the characters, the action and the themes of the story.

Consider that fiction, especially short fiction, need not be narrative. It may poke a toe or two into the pond of prose poetry. Often short-short stories and flash fiction are less stories than they are implications of stories—they are descriptions of situations that do not fulfill a plot arc through crises to climax. Freytag be damned!

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn” goes the famous six-word story. There is no narrative, though often one, and so often one of tragedy for a child, is imagined. The lack of narrative, however, leaves what story we imagine open-ended and vague, since the “story,” as it is, offers no characterization or tension. It could just as likely be that the baby for whom the shoes were intended had bigger feet than the parents thought, and lived a full, happy life and is now retired—well, very retired, since the story dates from 1906.

Critic John Gerlach’s offers a good yardstick for determining genre in his essay “The Margins of Narrative: The Very Short Story, the Prose Poem, and the Lyric” (Lohafer and Clarey: Short Story Theory at a Crossroads). He concedes the obvious, that genre is a messy business and there is much overlap, but he proposes that a poem asserts “lyric quality,” and a story, “narrative point.” Simply, if the reader is more interested in the meaning of figures of speech or the quality of emotion—“how much do I love thee?”—as opposed to what happens next, he is reading a poem. Stories, on the other hand, drive the reader’s interest to learn the outcome of a tension. Like so much of life, this, in the final analysis, is subjective.

Given that fiction is not the same as narrative (fiction is invented or imagined situation, whereas narrative is storytelling), if the writer wishes to write prose narration, then there is a place for prosaic sentences—in fact—most of the sentences of a story, ought to have the purpose of telling the story. The story writer must be careful not to become enmeshed in gorgeous, showy sentences to the detriment of moving the story along.

I have read books by writers who were best known for their poetry. Lord! The sentences of these books were, taken one at a time, masterpieces of imagery, sound and rhythm. But they didn’t push the narrative forward. Certainly, there is room in short stories and even more so in novels to wallow in the lush meadows, or awe at the mountain tops, but at some point, prose must also walk the reader through those meadows or climb those mountains. Often that is the work of the ordinary sentence, the plain Jane who chops the wood and carries the water of the narration. When we can have a sentence that is beautiful and carries the load, then it is one that sparkles.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is quoted as distinguishing between prose and poetry, this way:

“Prose = words in their best order; — poetry = the best words in the best order.” (Henry Nelson Coleridge: Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge).

At first glance, there seems to be wisdom in the statement, but—dare I argue with a great poet, much less a dead one—the definitions raise more confusion than clarity. Who is to say what is “the best order “ or “the best words?” It seems subjective—and yet, the gist of the definitions is worth a ponder. Both forms are concerned with words and with order—that poetry is concerned with the “best” words, seems to me the bias of a poet, since a good prose sentence that is clear and functional must also be using the best words for its purpose. In any case, what this quip, likely proclaimed after throwing back a sherry or two, fails to tell us is what purpose, what literary or emotional effect, is intended by these best words in their best order. In telling a traditional story, the prosaic sentence that gets the reader up to that mountain top is a better one than the poetic line that is static.

Literary writing is wild and wonderful! I encourage experimentation in whatever genre. Let’s write the most beautiful sentences that we can imagine. But sentences, like our actions in life, have consequences, and the last thing a writer wants to do is to bore a reader.

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Anthony Grooms is having a good summer. He is being inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame on August 2, 2025, at 1 PM at the Athens-Clarke County Library. The program is open and free to the public. His essay, “Hold On!” which talks about survival strategies learned from growing up in Jim Crow will be published in the August 2025 issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. And his garden is producing plump, tasty tomatoes. To learn more about his work, go to anthonygrooms.com or anthonygrooms.substack.com.