Myths about short and long sentences

Start talking about writing and somebody will inevitably say, “You should keep your sentences short.”

The notion that quality writing requires short sentences has become axiomatic. There’s just one problem – it isn’t necessarily true.

Yes, American novelists such as Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses) and James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia) have made a career of writing short sentences with as few commas as possible. Observe this example of McCarthy’s writing from No Country for Old Men.

Moss sat with the heels of his boots dug into the volcanic gravel of the ridge and glassed the desert below him with a pair of twelve power German binoculars. His hat pushed back on his head. Elbows propped on his knees. The rifle strapped over his shoulder with a harness-leather sling was a heavybarreled .270 on a ’98 Mauser action with a laminated stock of maple and walnut. It carried a Unertl telescopic sight of the same power as the binoculars. The antelope were a little under a mile away.

Or this passage of staccato prose from Ellroy’s memoir The Hilliker Curse.

So women will love me. I invoked The Curse a half century ago. It defines my life from my tenth birthday on. The near-immediate results have kept me in near-continuous dialogue and redress. I write stories to console her as a phantom. She is ubiquitous and never familiar. Other women loom flesh and blood. They have their stories.

Another American novelist, Tom Wolfe (Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full), has taken a different track, becoming a heralded novelist with books filled with notoriously long sentences. Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury) is even more renowned for his long and winding sentences.

The writing produced by those favoring short sentence and those favoring long sentences works very well despite the stylistic differences.

Most writers vary their sentence lengths to achieve rhythm and purpose (as do McCarthy, Ellroy, Wolfe and Faulkner despite their respective reputations for short and long sentences).

We also vary sentence lengths to achieve a specific purpose. For example, a series of short sentences slows your copy, which is why it makes sense to use a series of short sentences when explaining complicated material. It’s easier to assimilate and understand when delivered in small bites.

A series of lengthy sentences will accelerate your prose. So when you want your copy to start zooming, well-structured long sentences will accomplish that feat.

One of writing myths is that short sentences are easy to read. Not necessarily. Poorly constructed short sentences will leave readers as flummoxed as long, convoluted sentences.
Another writing myth is that long sentences are difficult to read. This is only true if the sentence isn’t properly constructed. Otherwise, a long sentence can breeze past with ease and clarity. Take this Tom Wolfe sentence from I Am Charlotte Simmons as an example.

Amid a rumbling caravan of dollies, they went through the Little Yard’s great arched entryway and its fifteen-foot-high stone corridor and out into a courtyard … the Little Yard, which turned out to be a quadrangle the length of a football field, with ancient trees on a lush green lawn bordered by boxwood hedges and big red-orange poppies blazing amid beds of lavenderish blue nepeta and crisscrossed by worn walkways that looked as if they had been there forever.

(The ellipses are the author’s; no content was removed from the sentence.)

Yes, it’s long but easy to read and rich in information that accumulates as the sentence stretches out like a meandering psychedelic anaconda.

That’s all for this post. In a few weeks I’ll write about the key to writing long sentences that flow with ease and clarity. Hint: It boils down to the “kernel” of the sentence.

 

 

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