I have seen a debate about sentence length in writing. Most say shorter is better, but some say long sentences aren't bad, if properly constructed. I think some have taken long sentences too far and likely need to check punctuation, like Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club, 13,955 word sentence. What are your thoughts?
I can't find a place I can read Coe's sentence without buying the book, but it's obviously a gimmick and I doubt if it's grammatically correct. Anybody can string 14,000 words together if the 'sentence' doesn't have to make sense. I tend toward shorter sentences but I think it's all about context. I don't think there's any right or wrong.
I noticed this in my writing....I write long sentences. It is also no surprise that I am a rather long-winded conversationalist in person. I started writing short stories, mostly flash, as a way to force myself to work with smaller phrasing and it's helped a lot. I still write longish sentences, but now I'll edit them down to shorter phrases and less of them. "How can I say this with less words and yet be more impactful" is my mantra...
I used to write long sentences myself to try and give the writing a more dramatic tone. Turns out, I was overdoing it. That said, for special moments in the story, it is okay to do as long as you don't make the sentence too convoluted and hard to read. That defeats the point. I can't help but think that such debates are pointless because each writer will tend to write sentences with length tuned to their style. That stuff isn't set in stone and you should find what works for you. The only reason you should consider changing it is if you get complaints from your readers or if some feedback you received says so. If you are a genius, write in long sentences, and make it work, who cares? But I love short sentences, especially for action. You can go rapid fire with the verbs and still sound okay.
This is true, but often I find myself using longer sentences for action, divided into brief clauses. Something like: 'He drew the gun and turned, fired off a quick burst of shots, and somebody yelped in pain.' To my ear at least it works like a series of brief sentences. Sometimes I think it flows better, maybe because commas aren't full stops the way periods are, and don't interrupt the action quite as much. But I wouldn't do a whole action sequence like that, it needs to be balanced out with some really short sentences and a few medium-length ones that aren't divided up by commas. Maybe a long-ish one here and there at times too. But in general I like to use a mix of short, medium and long sentences to keep things varied rhythmically. If I fall into one of those choices for too long I can feel it, it throws things off.
Great advice...you said something similar to someone else in another post a while ago that got me thinking this way.
I'll see your 14k word sentence and raise you to over 66k, and still no full stop, so an unfinished sentence of over 66k words in Mike McCormack's Solar Bones. I've mentioned it on the forum before, fantastic book, very well written. I imagine the continued sentence is intended to make some kind of statement about life and death, but still doesn't feel like a gimmick. Too much quality in the writing. I do like a good, long sentence. Anyone that tells you that you shouldn't use them has little regard for the intellect of your readership. There's balance and nuance and all kinds of ways to have the desired effect, sometimes involving shorter sentences and sometimes longer sentences that sometimes require a second read over to grasp their meaning. If it's worth it, then it's worth it. If it's not, then choose your words more carefully.
I do that too! If I use short, simple-type sentences like 'He fired the gun.' all the time I'll sound flat as hell! Can't have that. Gotta keep the paragraph rhythm varied and be elegant with structures, right?
I was going to post this too. Vary it up or it'll sound tiresome and overly poetic. It's a description of the planet your characters dwell in, not a haiku.
If I paste together the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible, changing all of the full stops to commas, do I win? Sentences should be the right length. Not too long, not too short - just the length that Goldilocks would choose. A bit of variety, as mentioned above, is useful. And sentence length should partly be determined by what is happening. An exciting fight scene should use short, punchy sentences. I remember reading that Agatha Christie's mysteries drop in sentence length as they get nearer the climax.
My understanding is that sentence length can be used as a tool to create a certain mood, for example, placing short sentences together, which creates tension. I assume the knack is to mix long and short sentences.
The general wisdom is that short sentences speed up the pace of the prose, deliver sharper feelings, like anxiety or fear, and have greater energy. Longer sentences slow down the pace, and are good for descriptions. They have a slower energy. I suppose my writing is a mix of short and long, but I can see certain genres leaning more towards one or the other. Anyway, this thread called to mind something I had read about the shape of a sentence. That's it's not just length, but the words chosen, and even the amount of consonants compared to vowels. Intuitively, I think I understand what is meant by shape, but it sure is something hard to put into words. My research led me to this book which has received glowing reviews: How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One
I don't know what some of the words mean, but I think I get the overall meaning? What do you think of the following sentence? “Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.” ― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Bingo, there it is. This is what I was groping to say earlier. The segmented sentences I was talking about (This happened, then this, then this, and the result was this.) have a very different shape from other kinds of sentences with multiple clauses divided by commas. You could use lots of commas and lots of clauses and still have what feels like a long meandeirng sentence, like this: Though he tried, he found it was difficult to pull the gun from its holster, which was jammed pretty far down into his pants, and rather than pull it out in one quick move like he had intended to, he ended up sort of half-pulling it, upon which it got tangled into his shirt, and then he tried to shoot right through the fabric, but some of it had gotten mashed up behind the trigger, so it didn't work at all. That's not at all the same quick, rapid-fire shape as what I wrote before: He drew the gun and turned, fired off a quick burst of shots, and somebody yelped in pain. The first sentence uses clauses that themselves are long, and the sentence itself is all one thing, with little sections inserted into it, rather than a series of what feel like terse, very short sentences strung together and separated by commas. Each clause (phrase?) works like a sentence itself (the first one is like two short sentences)—He drew the gun / he turned / he fired off a quick burst of shots / somebody yelped in pain. I didn't notice it at the time, but even here I used varying lengths of clauses. The second one is the shortest at only two words—the first and last each have four, and the third one clocks in at a nice medium sentence length (He fired off a quick burst of shots). Well, I guess it qualifies as medium in this format anyway, compared to what it's surrounded by.
More from Anthony Burgess: "And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with the atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning."
Interesting concept... I've never really viewed it in the sense of shaping a lyric, but it is certainly something that comes into play when writing lyrics now that you've mentioned it. Choosing the right words becomes very important when you've only got a few lines to say what you want to say, limited by a melody and tempo. I've not found fictional writing to be that way, though of course every word matters in either case. Fictional writing (if that is the proper term here) seems to sort of stretch out the concept of shaping a sentence by not having the same constraints as lyrical writing... Perhaps that is why I've gravitated towards shorter story writing...different but the same....hmmm. Sorry I'm rambling now lol
It seems to imply a three-dimensional quality to what you have written. It's both a gift and a skill that I am developing.
ACO quotes always strike me as miniature stories contained within their own sentences. The one you've quoted is a good example That one sentence is like it's own little story.
You can have some longer sentences in there for sure, as there should be a good mix. But when talking about average lengths, apparently there is research suggesting that shorter sentences are better for the general reading audience. I'm sure I've quoted this somewhere in the past, but I can't find the original study. These were the conclusions, though: "The longer your sentences, the less your readers will understand, according to research by the American Press Institute. The study shows that: When the average sentence length in a piece was fewer than eight words long, readers understood 100 percent of the story. Even at 14 words, they could comprehend more than 90 percent of the information. But move up to 43-word sentences, and comprehension dropped below 10 percent."
I think it depends on who your audience is. I'm writing mainly for the average readers of the 60s and 70s, since my stories are set in that period, and those are the people I think they'll resonate with the most. I don't think I could write anything that would appeal to the majority of today's younger set, and I'm really not interested in that.
Plus I wonder what kind of readers they focused on? The general public, or those who are actually interested in reading? Avid readers will be a lot more literate.
Certainly reading comprehension has fallen lower and lower each year for several decades now... shorter attention spans require smaller data dumps...sadly it's evolution, of a sort.
But reading develops a longer attention span. I suspected it might be the case (seems pretty intuitive) so I did a quick search. Ironically, this came from a page of microburst sound-byte type writing littered with bad SPaG and interspersed with huge animated ads: It expands a reader's attention span Another side effect of this incredible brain workout, reading not only improves memory, but in increases attention spans, too. Because of the sequential narrative style of most books — a beginning, middle, and end — reading encourages the brain to think similarly in sequence, and thus spend more time on building a story rather than rushing through each detail. Source So I think all that kind of info refers to the general public—addicted to cell phones, video games, and the internet—rather than people who like to read. Our audience is self-selecting and largely immune to these problems. Not entirely of course, even the most avid readers also scroll and side scroll, but they're also taking the antidote and developing attention-span resilience.
And without doing a search I can tell you that practicing any kind of art also lengthens and strengthens attention span. Writing, drawing, making stuff, tinkering around with electronics (if that's still possible in today's world), fixing household items when they break etc. So does getting outdoors and actually doing things in the real world. So does a meditation practice, exercise, and many other things many people like to do. Of course there are a lot of people who hardly do any of these things, but there's always been a massive difference between the general public and people who do creative things or things that bring self improvement. Whenever I start to get depressed about 'the state of the world' I stop and think about who Shakespeare's audience was—the potato-nosed rabble, not an intellectual elite. And they ate his stuff up, as entertainment, not as some highfalutin' fine art. I think this ever-dumber audiencethat we're told about is largely theoretical, and that individuals who might seem that way at times might actually read at times too. Real people arenot the same as theoretical models used in sociological planning. All of which is to say—if you want to write for people of average to high intelligence, build it (the body of work) and they will come. IIf we all dumb down our work to the ever-lowering lowest commond denominator, we';re contributing to the problem rather than helping to fix it. Look at pulp. writing from the 30s through the fifties—even though at the time they thought of the general public as the unwashed masses who were supposed to be mostly illiteratem most of it was quite well written, even if some of it used short words ans pretty simple sentences. And it encouraged a lot of people to become readersand become ever more literate.
