Miscellaneous

I?m reading Stanley Fish?s new book, How to Write a Sentence. It?s good. Stanley takes a structural approach to sentence-writing. It?s like the approach the C. Edward Good takes in his books, except that where Ed approaches structure grammatically, Stanley approaches it rhetorically.

Anyway, the reason for this post is for me to remember a thought on pp. 46?48 of Stanley?s book. There, Stanley analyzes this sentence from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen:

?It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.?

Here is the part of Stanley?s commentary on this sentence that I want to remember:

The terms for this kind of sentence are many: aphorism, proverb, adage, dictum, apothegm, sententia, maxim. The name is less important than the form, which is the pithy pronouncement of wisdom in a manner that does not invite disagreement. Austen?s sentence does not quite fit the pattern: it?s a bit too long, and because attention is called to the absoluteness of the claim, that claim is ever so slightly undermined; ?must be? in combination with ?truth universally acknowledged? is a bit too insistent and allows us to suspect an author mocking her own absolute pronouncement. It may seem counterintuitive, but you?ll have a better chance of persuading readers that what you are about to say is universally acknowledged as a truth if you don?t actually use the phrase ?It is a truth universally acknowledged.?