It's funny that in the 19th century sentences got so long that sometimes the writer would remind the reader of what was still in the air, by repeating it with "--I say, ". (I tried to look for an example but didn't find one straight away, sorry.)
In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
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Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#12i find it amusing that the essay alludes to the succinct-sentence-prescribing style guide, the elements of style , written by strunk & white (of charlotte's web fame), whose affiliiated institution also produced thomas pynchon, a writer whose meticulous verbosity may know no bounds but also produced some fascinatingly long sentences.
Strunk & White is, of course, nonsense and doesn't even follow its own made-up rules most of the time. See, e.g., http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15509
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#13it's attested that "show, don't tell" was created to reduce exposition, which CIA operatives had noticed were the places left-wing writers would put in their left-wing ideas.
https://twitter.com/eugen_levine/status/834865006705512449?l...
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#14T. R. Pearson's books such as "The Last of How it Was" have wonderfully long, rambling sentences that remind me of how some people in the southern US I've known speak.
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#15Dylan Thomas was always good for a few of these. “Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, be…
Even reduced to its most basic form I find it moving. Drawing it out so long and so forcefully really drives a point of passion home. Thanks for sharing this!
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#16Dylan Thomas was always good for a few of these. “Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, be…
I feel like if a college student had originally written this, or some more modern equivalent, it would have been shit on as sanctimonious with a needless wistfulness about it that feels like it’s straining to sound grand. I can just so easily see my old rhetoric teacher reading a line like, “jawbones of deacons” or “birds the color of red-flannel petticoats” from a student’s essay and just thinking come on, be a grown up, stop trying to sound like a big grown up writer.
I don’t say this to be critical of this passage at all. It just makes me feel like literary acclaim is just super random fashion signalling. When one person writes foo bar baz, we pay people lots of money to relive it on a stage and revere it as classic. Someone else could have totally thought to write foo bar baz in some other circumstance and be told they’re some simulacrum wanna-be spewing out overwrought drivel. It just seems so random.
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#17Yes, long sentences can be great, in fiction. They're rather like wandering trains of thought. With sequences of phrases that evoke shifting perspectives, feelings, etc.
But long sentences in scientific and technical writing can be impenetrable. Sort of like stand-alone proofs. Or even code, which must essentially be parsed. That stuff, I'd rather see broken out in a list or outline. And in fact, I sometimes do that.
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#18My favourite long sentence, from A. A. Milne, is self-aware:
> In after-years he liked to think that he had been in Very Great Danger during the Terrible Flood, but the only danger he had really been in was in the last half-hour of his imprisonment, when Owl, who had just flown up, sat on a branch of his tree to comfort him, and told him a very long story about an aunt who had once laid a seagull’s egg by mistake, and the story went on and on, rather like this sentence, until Piglet who was listening out of his window without much hope, went to sleep quietly and naturally, slipping slowly out of the window towards the water until he was only hanging on by his toes, at which moment luckily, a sudden loud squawk from Owl, which was really part of the story, being what his aunt said, woke the Piglet up and just gave him time to jerk himself back into safety and say, “How interesting, and did she?” when—well, you can imagine his joy when at last he saw the good ship, The Brain of Pooh (Captain, C. Robin; Ist Mate, P. Bear) coming over the sea to rescue him.
> And as that is really the end of the story, and I am very tired after that last sentence, I think I shall stop there.
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#19Yes, long sentences can be great, in fiction. They're rather like wandering trains of thought. With sequences of phrases that evoke shifting perspectives, feelings, etc. But long sentences in scientific and technical writing can be impenetrable. Sort of like stand-alone proofs. Or even code, which must essentially be parsed. That stuff, I'd rather see broken out in a list or outline. And in fact, I sometimes do that.
Your sentences should be as long or short as they need to be to communicate clearly
Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
#20How can an essay like this not mention David Foster Wallace? So many of the sentences in Infinite Jest were absolute doozies.