When do you end a sentence, and how do you lengthen one properly.

@waitingforzion - There isn't any rule about how long a sentence should be. As you write more, you'll get a feel for how to create sentences of many different lengths, as long as you focus on what you want to say, rather than getting fixated on how you say it.

Me? I like to vary the length of my sentences, which breaks up rhythm, but increases flow, if that makes sense. Like traveling a road by car. If you only come out of one curve and head straight into another, and then again, and again—and this pattern goes on for miles and miles—you'll get very fed up with that journey and start wishing for an occasional bit of straight road to break it up. At least I would. Any journey that contains curves, straight bits, tight curves, gentle curves, hills, valleys and changing vistas will make traveling more interesting and varied. I try to recreate that kind of journey with sentence lengths.

Sometimes you need to step back from what you've written (I'm talking paragraphs or pages, not single sentences) and see how it all flows together. Make changes. Combine a few sentences, or shorten a couple. Don't always start the sentence with the subject, or whatever your favourite pattern is. If you find yourself repeating patterns, see what you can do to break them up. You want your readers to be thinking about the content of your writing, don't you? Not joggity joggity joggity joggity joggity joggity joggity....

If you're looking for a formula for how to make a sentence longer, @Robert Musil 's suggestions about sentence diagramming are as good as any. But I wouldn't worry about adopting a formula yet. You obviously speak English well enough to write and get your meanings across to us here. Creative writing is more or less the same thing, so concentrate on what, rather than how. Figure out what you want to say with your writing first of all. Then say it—any old way you can. Work on the meaning until it's clear. And THEN start to worry about how it reads/sounds, and edit changes accordingly.

And good luck! I'd say worry less and create more. The more you have to work with, the easier the editing will be.

 

If you want to make sentences longer, you should try reading some James Joyce. Ulysses has one that comes in at over 3500 words long. Virginia Wolfe is also known for long sentences.

 

I'm going to offer some long sentences from Rumer Godden's book China Court. It was published in 1961, so it violates my "within the past 50 years" rule by six years.

As I see it, each of these sentences goes on for a while and ends with a sort of breathless feel--you'd have trouble reading them aloud. Each one covers a single thought, but some of them get some of that length by stretching away from that thought, and then snapping back again.

Now, Rumer Godden has a very distinctive style. I don't know if it's a "love it or hate it" style, because I love it, but anything I love this much has to be something that someone else can hate. Even if you love it, elements of it are a tightrope act that can't just be easily imitated.


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There has always been a rumour in the village that he has Gypsy blood and this, with the gossip that he is in reality Eustace’s father, might explain the magnificent and unexpected darkness of the two youngest of Eustace’s brood, Jared and Damaris, though they do not look Gypsy, but as if there were a strain, from some sailor perhaps, darker than Cornish, a Venetian or Spaniard.​

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Though these reasons for China Court’s name are invariably given by the village, it is from neither of them, but from the more mundane fact that the day the roof goes on, with beer for the workmen and a green bough in a chimney, is also the day Eustace – following in his uncle’s footsteps in making money – buys over the china-clay works at Canverisk.​

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It has a courtyard, where the kitchen and nursery wing makes an L, but the house is decidedly not a court: it is middle-sized ‘and middle-class,’ says Eliza, but the name suits a house built on the edge of the Cornish moors that have a strange foreign flavour as they roll to the skyline, with their tors and the pale-coloured Chinese coolie-hat shapes of the sand dumps at the different china-clay works breaking the dark landscape: Stannon, Hawks Tor, Temple, and Canverisk.​

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It was odd that Mrs Quin, who has done less in the village than any other lady of China Court – Adza with her soups and visits, or conscientious Anne, or Bella with her Red Cross lectures and Workers’ Adult Education courses – should be the one St Probus loves, perhaps the first it really accepts; though Great-Uncle Mcleod is village-born, the Eustace Quins when they come from Devonshire are reckoned as foreigners in St Probus, foreigners from England.​

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No, Moose, the KJ is based upon a pure manuscript which is no longer available to us, thus the current reliance upon corrupted versions.

Curious, though, how the modern bibles say pretty much the same thing as the KJ.

 

They really don't say the same thing as the KJV. In the modern Bibles many phrases are altered or missing, and whole verses are missing. The verses in the modern Bibles often do not say the same things as the verses in the KJV.

We still have the manuscripts that the KJV was translated from. They are part of the majority texts. The modern translations are based on the minority texts, manuscript fragments which largely differ from one another and contradict one another. The majority texts are numerous, and are not mere fragments, and they all agree perfectly with one another, differing only slightly, as in the spelling of words.

 

I don't have much to add to this excellent discussion except that AFAIK, none of the Greek or Hebrew texts we have of the Bible had punctuation as we know it, so parsing the text into sentences was something done by the translators, who were trying to convey the text breaks into patterns familiar to their languages.

(That's a mighty long sentence, isn't it?)