Stanley Fish's top 5 sentences

Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University. He has previously taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

One of the world's foremost authorities on John Milton, in 2006 Fish applied the "Page 69 Test" to his book, How Milton Works.

His new book is How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One.

One of Fish's top five sentences, as told to Slate:

Jonathan Swift (from A Tale of a Tub, 1704): "Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her appearance for the worse."

Here, Swift forces us into a momentary fellowship ("you will hardly believe") with a moral blindness we must finally reject.

Read about another of Fish's favorite sentences.

--Marshal Zeringue