Assuming there is such a thing as the American sentence, how has it changed over the years, the centuries?

Will it, must it change in years to come? What threats lurk in the margins? And what new arms do we have against them?

The threat to good sentences: bad ones, easy ones, false ones, ones that create simple and dull expectations, or ruin expectations, or lull and lower standards until the sentence is just a mouthsong meant to stroke the head and affirm what we already know. The real question here is what elaborations or extensions of grammar are people able to understand and why is there such a low threshold for excursions into the possibilities of grammar?

What will people tolerate, what will invade the brain and expand our notions of utterability and sense without being too difficult or unusual to follow? How come most readers are not prepared to read writing that leaves the territory of familiar grammar?

The problem is that grammar allows infinite, beautiful, strange and startling sentences, but the writer isn't freely allowed to use or explore them if the so-called audience is kept in mind. The grammatical palette, if communication is to be achieved, must be kept limited to what narrative and commercial tradition has ratified.

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