I agree. More often than not, I will put a book down when it takes me almost 1/2 a page of exhausting compound sentences just to find out the guy is coming out of unconsciousness looking at his wife's face. I can appreciate the artistry here, but I did laugh when I showed it to one of my friends who simply stated "overly verbose bulls***."
I'm not sure I understand this. Compound sentences do not have to be exhausting, and short sentences, if too many of them are stacked up together, can be. Breaking a long sentence up into shorter sentences doesn't necessarily make the text easier to read. Replacing a semicolon with a period and a capital doesn't even change the wording, and, in fact, it might make even a good reader blink because it separates what are really two parts of the same thought. A well-composed long sentence can be clearer and easier to read than a set of shorter, choppier sentences that contain the same information. Compare The Doors' song "Light My Fire" (a simple two-bar melody repeated four times to form an eight-bar verse) with Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (a much more melodically, harmonically, and rhythmically complex verse) to see a musical analogy of what I'm talking about. "Light My Fire" is easy to follow and understand, but is "Bridge Over Troubled Water" really any more difficult? I don't think so. It's not confusing; it's gorgeous. If you find yourself tripping over a writer's long sentences, read the paragraph - not just the sentence; we need the context - aloud. It will become clear. After practicing this technique a little, you won't even have to use it - long sentences (by decent writers, at least) will be easy to follow and will make perfect sense.
@maia: you misunderstood me. I wasn't referring to badly written long sentences. Read Chekhov or Dostoyevsky for some good examples of what I meant. @thewordsmith: When I moved to the English-speaking world, one thing I noticed most acutely (because I was writing a lot then) is that English doesn't naturally tolerate sentences as long as what is considered normal in slavic languages. Somehow, what flows beautifully, content-wise, in a long sentence in Russian, becomes confusing in English, it takes skill to craft and even then, you have to space them out because they get too "full-on" if they are close together. In slavic languages, long sentences are frequent and don't "weigh" so much, somehow. I think the apparent lack of cases (declinations) makes it difficult to tipify adjectives and nouns adequately to keep it clear what which part of the sentence is referring to. Even now, I struggle wanting to write much longer sentences in English, and have to correct myself, cut them in half, that sort of thing. I don't know a more linguistic explanation for this, but I am sure there is one.
I've noticed this too, and it's quite refreshing how some of the translated Russian literature have retained long, complex sentences. Then again, just go back to the 19th century and read English & American classics and you'll find long sentences galore. Well, information and texts have become more and more concise in many cultures and languages, so I wouldn't blame just the education. I don't know if we have a shorter attention span nowadays or what, but we often want things delivered to us as quickly and efficiently as possible. Maybe the underestimation of our ability to process big chunks of information has become a self-fulfilling profecy?
OVB, exactly the point of the effort, in response to comments that compound sentences were too difficult to read and/or understand. But I do think "OVB" may well become a part of my everyday vocabulary.
You are correct in your assumption, at least in my opinion. The case structure of Russian, which makes it so easy to follow the parts of speech in a sentence, are probably the cause for this. (Я тоже говорю по-русски. Я работал переводчиком шесть лет в ВВС США.) Spanish also allows for longer sentences because of capacity to follow train through verb conjugations and gender even though it is a pro-drop language where subject pronouns are almost always elided. The more isolating a language is, the less tolerant it is of long structure. English is very isolating, has no gender, and verb conjugation is minimal (only the third person singular varies).
Really? That's awesome, so are you a native Russian speaker? What is SŠA? I spoke Russian to a beginner translator level at the end of high school, but since then I had to assimilate English completely. Now I understand Russian quite well, especially written down, but if I try to speak it English comes out instead. It takes quite an effort to speak like that. I'd need a year in Russia to get fluent again. I always found this side-effect quite sad because I used to love speaking Russian, and reading in the original, especially poetry. The only other more sublime experience was reading Pablo Neruda in translation, I wish I could read it in Spanish. Your explanation is fascinating though. It's very similar to Serbian, actually they are almost mutually understandable only deceptively different, so what's third person plural in Serbian is actually third person singular in Russian, what is dative in one becomes genitive in the other, things like that. Gets confusing. I always found it harder to learn than English, because of such an abundant grammar which I had to learn all over again.
США = Соединённые Штаты Америки = USA = United States of America. ВВС = Военно-воздушные силы = AF = Air Force. No, I am not a native speaker. I am Puerto Rican. I learned Russian at the DLIFLC in Monterey, CA. Decades have passed since that was my life. I still read it well and can watch Russian film with little difficulty, but speaking it is another thing. The difference between active and passive memory, of which you yourself make note in your post. I now work as a Spanish interpreter instead for the USDOJ.
The funny thing about English teachers is you can't seem to win either way. Long sentences like the one in the OP, you get chided for it being too long. In my most recent work I was describing waking up from a KO and used a series of short sentences to portray a fast paced confusing environment. Those were all the sudden too short :/
There is absolutely nothing wrong with long sentences PROVIDED they are correctly puntuated and I cannot see a problem with reading them, unless the reader is not well versed in punctuation. I think that a mix of shorter and longer sentences is good and makes the writing more interersting and varied. I suspect that the dislike that some people have of long sentences is born of the fact that they do not 'read' the punctuation as naturally as the words and the writers of those sentences do. I have a member in one of my writing groups who sometimes puts semi-colons in the most inappropriate places. I asked her why and she said, 'Well, sometimes I think the sentence is getting too long so I just do it to break it up'!
being 'too long' or 'too short' depends on the skill of the writer and how well/badly the sentence is worded...
This is a bit of an oversimplification. A perfectly punctuated sentence can still aspire with little effort to stymie the reader as to its meaning. Punctuation alone is not the answer. And to give an IRL example of the above quoted sentiment with which I agree in full: Reflexive Pronoun Trouble
