[Article] Teaching Myself to See Sentences

Recently I've been turning books I've found useful into reusable skills. It sounds a little strange when I put it that way. Take something I've learned from a book, tease out the ideas that seem useful, and turn them into instructions that an AI can apply to my own work. Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence was one of the books I tried this out with. I've been using it to look more closely at my own sentences, particularly the ones that don't quite work. What interests me isn't having the AI rewrite them. It's being able to see the choices inside a sentence more clearly. Take this one from my fiction vignette, The Record Says Otherwise: "The last thing Sorn's father had left him was a cart, two mules, and forty bolts of river-dyed cloth worth enough to clear the family's debts and have something left over." I think Fish might actually have liked it as its syntax is doing narrative work rather than merely delivering information. Its movement is fairly simple. We start with the person…