How to Write a Sentence

Here’s the formula:
Sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation.

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
(“Permanently,” 1960)

The answer is given in statement (2); it is a logical organization, an assertion that is also overbroad, but one that can be refined and narrowed with the help of an exercise. Look around the room you are now in and pick out four or five items. Then add a verb or a modal auxiliary (would, should, could, must, may, might, shall, can, will). Finally, make a sentence out of what you have. (You will of course have to add words.) My list is “pen,” “chair,” “garbage can,” “printer,” and “shall,” and my first try at a sentence is “Before using the printer I shall remove the pen from the chair and throw it in the garbage can.” Other sentences might be, “I shall move the garbage can so that I can pull the chair up to the printer and have access to my pen,” or “I shall set the printer on the chair and get my pen out of the garbage can.”
Notice first that the number of sentences that could be made out of these components is theoretically infinite. Or, to put it another way, any number of contents (little stories or narratives) can be fashioned out of these meager materials. We shall return to the question of content—what exactly it is and what its relationship to form is—but first I want to pose an apparently simple question: What is it that we do when we make a sentence out of a random collection of words? What is it that we add to those words that causes them to form something we recognize as a sentence? The answer can be given in a single word, and that word is “relationships.” In my third sentence—“I shall set the printer on the chair and get my pen out of the garbage can”—each of the words in the original list now exists in a logical relation to the others. “Shall” is now joined to a verb, “set,” to form an action; “printer” is now the object of that action, which is performed by “I”; “chair” is now part of a prepositional phrase (a phrase temporally and spatially relating objects to one another)—“upon the chair”—which names the place where the action of setting occurs. “And” introduces a sequence that is, structurally, a mirror image of what precedes it. “Pen” is the object of “shall get” and “out of the garbage can” names the place where and the manner in which the pen has been gotten. No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.

Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (1959, 2000)

Sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation.

t was in my stomach before it was off the shelf.”

She was enrolled at Harvard before she was conceived.” “He had won the match before the first serve.” “They were celebrating while the other team was still at bat.”

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A sentence is, in John Donne’s words, “a little world made cunningly.” (Donne is speaking of the human body, but that is just another composition.)