Everyone knows how to write a bad sentence

Barry Lopez is a fine writer. If you wanted a model of humane and intelligent prose, of beautifully uttered sentences, and paragraphs as nicely arranged as the communities of lichen and moss on the sandstone rocks I passed this morning on my walk, you could do worse than study Arctic Dreams or one of his collections of fables – River Notes, say. A critic I know, reviewing Arctic Dreams, wrote once that Lopez doesn't seem to know how to write a bad sentence. It was a nice thing to say. Gracious and apt. But untrue. Barry Lopez knows perfectly well how to write a bad sentence. Everyone does. Even you.

What makes Lopez a good writer is that he knows the difference between those of his sentences that work and those that don't; between those he gets nearly right and those he nails; between those that sing and swing and those that mumble and fail. Sentences fail for many reasons. You may not know enough about what a sentence is, for instance, to reach the end with poise. Or you may, like Lopez, know more than enough, but you give them too much weight to carry; you work them too hard. And they break.