One good sentence

Staring helplessly at a broken appliance or other household
malfunction, I often recall a quip by Joseph Epstein, an essayist and editor:
the only thing I can fix is a sentence.

If editors are
good at fixing sentences, it is because before they learned to fix sentences
they learned to enjoy tinkering with them, the way some people like tinkering
with a faucet valve or the inside of a toaster. What would happen if one used a
different verb there? What if one compressed that thought this way? What about
linking those two sentences with a dependent clause? What about slowing the
sentence down or speeding it up? Is it better or worse that way?

Stanley Fish likes to tinker with sentences. His little book
How to Write a Sentence
(HarperCollins) is a meditation on sentences he admires. Like an athlete
looking at videotape of an all-star performance, Fish breaks down some great
sentences--by writers like John Updike and John Donne--to see why they have the
effect they do. Then he sees if he can imitate it.