An uninterruptible stream. And yet we study the work itself as if its molten fire had hanlened into rock..

Do you remember feeling, when you were writing a paper for school, That your vocabulary was steadily shrinking?

Were you asked to write in order to be heard, to be listened to? Asked to write a piece that mattered to you? Was there ever a satisfactory answer to the question, "Why am I telling you this?" Besides "It's due on Monday"?

"And then one day." You know exactly how those four words feel. You know exactly what they do.

The obsession with transition negates a basic truth about writing, A magical truth. You can get anywhere from anywhere, Always and almost instantly. The gap between sentences is sometimes a pause for breath And sometimes an echoing void. And if you can get anywhere from anywhere, You can start anywhere And end anywhere. There is no single necessary order.

A reader is likelier to get lost cutting his way through The jungle of transitions than crossing the gap of a well-made ellipsis

It gives the reader pause.

The meaning of the sentence is never a substitute for the sentence itself, Not to a six-year-old

ou do very well on the reading comprehension por­tion of the test. But no one said a word about following a trail of com­mon sense

You were taught that reading is extraction

You're also two people, writer and reader. This is a tremendous asset.

Every form of writing turns the world into language,

The answer is simple. Your job as a writer ii making 1entence1. Most of your time will be spent making 1entenc:e1 In your head. In . your head. id no one ever teU you this? That i th wrttc:r', 1Jfe. Never Imagine you've left the level of the sentence b hind

Can a short sentence sound like a harbinger? Anadumbration

Many people assume there's a correlationbetween sentence length and the sophisticationor complexity of an idea or thought--even intel-ligence generally.

What you've been taught.2.What you assume is true because you've heard itrepeated by others.3. What you feel, no matter how subtle.4. What you don't know.5. What you learn from your own experience.These are the ways we know nearly everything about the world around us.

You've been taught to believe that h childish, s ort sentences areMerely a first step toward writina longer , • • -"t> sentences.

The difficulty is forcing yourself to keep them short.

It doesn't wave to its friends in the audience

he hardest is knowing what each sentenceactually says

Humanity, as a result, is far too slender an abstraction to carry the burden of culpability.

It would be be more accurate to describe the crisis as a clash between the expanding demands of humankind and a finite world.”

the story of human nature can come in many forms, both in the Anthropocene genre and in other parts of climate change discourse.

when humanity ignited its first dead tree, it could only lead, one million years later, to burning a barrel of oil.

when our ancestors learned how to set things ablaze, they lit the fuse of business-as-usual.

the inescapable fate for a planet subjected to humanity’s “business-as-usual.”