Sift the debris of a young writer’s education, and you find dreadful things — strictures, prohibitions, dos, don’ts, an unnatural and nearly neurotic obsession with style, argument and transition. Yet in that debris you find no traces of a fundamental question: where do sentences come from? This is a philosophical question, as valuable in the asking as in the answering. But it’s a practical question, too. Think about it long enough, and you begin to realize that many, if not most, of the things we believe about writing are false.
This astonishing editorial can be found at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/where-do-sentences-come-from/?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20120814