Long sentences revisited

The recent blog post I wrote about long sentences – The case for long sentences (and how to make them readable) – provoked some buzz from members of the LinkedIn groups I belong to.

One person said she would like to write more long sentences but finds they get batted down by editors who insist on short sentences.

Another respondent flatly rejected long sentences, saying she didn’t like reading them.

A fellow writing instructor asked if I actually teach businesspeople to write long sentences. The answer, I acknowledged, was no. The reason? Cumulative sentences and other long-sentence forms are beyond the needs of all but the most advanced forms of business writing, (though I do encourage businesspeople to vary the length of their sentences for rhythmic purposes).

By and large, long sentences serve the interests of fiction and creative non-fiction writing.

That said, I still find myself getting annoyed by people (especially writers) who dismiss long sentences, despite their ability to create color, momentum, hypnotic rhythms and suspense.

I can’t help but march out some more examples from a few of my favorite authors. These first ones come from Douglas Adams’ hysterically funny book Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency .

Mason gave him another grim look from a vast repertoire he had developed, which ranged from very, very blackly grim at the bottom of the scale, all the way up to tiredly resigned and only faintly grim, which he reserved for his children’s birthdays.

Michael usually referred to his mother as an “old battle ax.” If she was fairly compared to a battle ax it could only be an exquisitely crafted, beautifully balanced battle ax with an elegant minimum of fine engraving which stopped just short of its gleaming, razor edge. One swipe from such an instrument and you wouldn’t even know you’d been hit until you tried to look at your watch a little later and discovered your arm wasn’t on.

When John Updike stretched his muscles the result was elegant, elongated sentences like these from his novel Villages.

That both Deerfield and Amherst were both all-boy institutions when he’d attended them was insufficient explanation for the single-sex attitude that accompanied his presence as strongly as his bad choice in aftershave.

Owen’s little room was next to his parents and their exchanges un-ignorably seeped into his ears, the brisk thrusts and counter-thrusts of a quarrel, the sighs and groans of weariness in the evening, the playful chatter that began the day.

Star comedic novelist Carl Hiaasen (Stormy Weather, Native Tongue) offers up word constructions of this stripe.

It was inevitable that the poacher and the counterfeiter would bond, sharing as they did a blanket contempt for government, taxes, homosexuals, immigrants, minorities, gun laws, assertive women and honest work.

He had pictured the intimate ceremony taking place in the bedroom, of course, after a night of athletic lovemaking, Joey, still aglow, unfolding the prenuptial agreement and holding it to the flame of a lilac-scented candle.

Lastly, here’s a favorite I collected a few years ago from an article published in the New York Times Book Review.

John Chapman’s ability to freely cross borders that other people believed to be fixed and unbreachable – between the red world and the white world, between wilderness and civilization, even between this world and the next – was one of the hallmarks of his character and probably the thing that most confounded people about the man.

Go long, at least on occasion. It changed the game of football, it could change your writing as well.

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