The Trouble With Intentions In Writing On their own, sentences are implacably honest. They may be long, short, simple, complex, clear, ambiguous, even incoherent. But they don't try to hide those qualities. They are what they are and they say what they say. It's as plain as the words on their faces. The trouble is that most sentences have writers, a fact that readers are well aware of. That makes it hard to consider sentences entirely on their own. Other questions arise. What's she saying? What did he mean? To these questions, I'd add another. Does the writer know what that sentence actually says? The answer is routinely no. After years of teaching creative writing, I still find this amazing. It means that, despite themselves, writers are often engaged in acts of unwitting self-contradiction. Imagine how it works. A writer speaks the language, knows the vocabulary, and tries to honor the rules of grammar and syntax. Yet he regularly produces sentences of whose literal meaning he's completely unaware. In its own way, this is fantastic, like setting out to knit a cardigan, producing an armoire, and wondering why it's so loose in the shoulders. Here's an example, written by a student several years ago: "I also had my father's thick fingers, fingers that I often hid underneath thighs." You see the problem of course. The author apparently hides his (or her) fingers under anyone's thighs, not just his (or her) own. This is what the sentence actually says, though not what the writer is hoping it says. Here's another example: "Fixed-gear bikes are ridden exclusively on these tracks." This sentence is almost proud of its perfect ambiguity. It means one of two things: "People ride fixed-gear bikes only on these tracks" or "On these tracks people ride only fixed gear bikes." Both are statements about exclusivity, but one is about bikes, the other about tracks. The sentence as written offers no way to choose between them. It would be tempting to let the context make it clear if the context itself weren't so often ambiguous. Besides, context isn't for determining the literal meaning of a sentence. It's for helping us hear overtones and implications, allowing a writer to say more than what a sentence literally says. Why didn't the writers catch these mistakes? Probably because they were looking at their intentions - what they meant to say - not the words they put on the page. The sentence, as written, was invisible to them. Readers also fail to catch such mistakes because they're good at guessing what the writer really means. It's not that they're under-reading - skipping past the problem in a sentence. They're nearly always over-reading, alive to the writer's intention, as if the writer were somehow immanent in the sentence, looking over the reader's shoulder, expecting the benefit of the doubt. We do this all the time in conversation. And so the sentence ceases to be a sentence - a verbal construct of a certain length, velocity and rhythm with, at bottom, an unambiguous literal meaning. It becomes a sign instead that telepathic communication is about to commence. For the writer - the maker of sentences -there's a contradiction here. You really are present, as present as it's possible to be in ink or pixels, in the sentences you make, no matter how plain they are. Writers who feel they lack a certain style tend to forget this and burden the prose with markings of their own identity. Yet it's necessary to write as if your sentences will be orphaned, because they will be. When called to the stand in the court of meaning, your sentences will get no coaching from you. They'll say exactly what their words say, and if that makes you look ridiculous or confused, guess what? Sentences are always literal, no matter how much some writers abhor the idea of being literal. In fact, nothing good can begin to happen in a writer's education until that sinks in. Your opinion of what your sentence means is always overruled by what your sentence literally says. A good reader may be good at following the leaps and bounds of your thinking but is also, always, reading literally, alive to the misdirection of ambiguous sentences. This means you'll need to write, and revise, as if your intentions were invisible and your sentences will be doing all the talking, all on their own. This may be the hardest thing a writer has to learn. Looking at a sentence you've made is like looking at yourself in the shard of a mirror. A part of you has to be dreadfully literal-minded (and impervious to self-flattery) in order to do the work of making good, clear sentences. Seeing what your sentences actually say is never easy, but it gets easier with practice. There's even a certain pleasure in discovering the booby traps you've laid for yourself in your prose. It's helpful to pretend you didn't write the sentence, but that's not enough (and self-deceit of that kind vanishes quickly). The trick is discovering a literal-mindedness in yourself and developing it until you can read with cunning. Try to practice reading your own sentences the way the reader does - with no advance knowledge of what they say. Be alert for ambiguities of every kind. Become a connoisseur of ambiguity. Sentences are wily and multifarious, secretive, mischievous. Language is inherently playful, eager to make nonsense and no-sense if it gets out of order. Inexperienced writers tend to trust that sentences will generally turn out all right - or all right enough. Experienced writers know that every good sentence is retrieved by will from the forces of chaos. So don't be blinded by what you think you're saying. The sentence you make won't give you the benefit of the doubt, even though the reader may. And don't assume that the literal meaning of a sentence is the least important one. It's the only important one. Without the accuracy of being literal, there's nothing to build on. Even metaphors - the best ones anyway - are literal-minded. But that's a story for another day. Verlyn Klinkenborg is a member of The New York Times Editorial Board and the author, most recently, of "Several Short Sentences About Writing."