The Alive Sentence

In Donald Murray’s writing conference practice, he would read a student’s draft and search for one thing: the sentence the student had almost cut. Everything around it was generic, dutiful, competent—the careful performance of school writing. But somewhere in the draft there was a sentence that broke from the template into something personal and specific, a sentence that could only have been written by this particular person about this particular experience. Murray would point to it and say: “This. Write more of this.” The student was almost always surprised, because the alive sentence was usually the one the student had considered removing—too informal, too risky, too obviously the writer’s own rather than the proper academic register. The surprise was the point. The alive sentence marked the place where the writer had accidentally escaped her own compliance and produced something genuine. It was the evidence that the true self had briefly interrupted the performance of the false self. In