The Wishes of a Sentence

At a bookstore event for my book, The Art of Brevity, one person asked me, “What unit of writing are you most focused on in the art of brevity, whether it’s word choice, the sentence, the paragraph, or something larger, like a scene or chapter?”

My answer didn’t take much thought: It’s the sentence.

I love the sentence because, as Gertrude Stein said, “A sentence has wishes as they decide.” A…