Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

lithub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 60 posts

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#21

Post by atr_gz »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #16
didgeoridoo wrote: post #7

Dylan 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 grow…

Because language is always going to depend on context. If a college student in 2018 writes like that then they are probably being pretentious and deserve some criticism. It seems a little dismissive to call it fashion signaling.

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#23

Post by gumby »

Nothing wrong with long sentences. In fact I am not a fan of Hemingway whose sentences are typically short.

I particularly like them in German, though they are uncommon on the web.

I think I demonstrate a bias: I tried to make my sentences in this comment hemingwayesque, but it appears I failed...yet they are, for my typical writing, brief!

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#24

Post by speedplane »

rudolfwinestock wrote: post #20

How can an essay like this not mention David Foster Wallace? So many of the sentences in Infinite Jest were absolute doozies.

> How can an essay like this not mention David Foster Wallace? So many of the sentences in Infinite Jest were absolute doozies.

How about Proust, 80 years earlier? Each of his half-page sentences are stand-alone pieces of art.

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#25

Post by speedplane »

Punctuation is what separates one sentence from another. If you believe that long sentences can be beautiful, you're not far off from believing that removing punctuation can bring benefits too.

A lack of punctuation can be especially beneficial in dialog. People don't converse in quotes and grammatically correct pauses. Conversation often flows back and forth, without direct responses to previous statements. There is often an underlying confusion to dialog, and when we impose punctuation around it, you lose something.

Consider the difference between: "You gonna do it tonight?" "Didn't you hear? You know he's going to be there."

And: You gonna do it tonight Didn't you hear - you know he's going to be there

There is an element of confusion of intent in the latter that can add to a story.

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#26

Post by mirimir »

rangibaby wrote: post #19
mirimir wrote: post #17

Yes, 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

Exactly so.

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#27

Post by ams6110 »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #12
clairity wrote: post #5

i 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

> doesn't even follow its own made-up rules

One must first know the rules, in order to break them.

Strunk & White, introduced to me by my sophomore year high school English teacher, is the reason I enjoy writing at all. Prior to that, writing was a chore that I loathed. The Elements of Style is one of the few things from high school that I still remember specifically and, 35 years later, still use. To me it is the K&R manual for writing.

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#28

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

ams6110 wrote: post #27
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> doesn't even follow its own made-up rules One must first know the rules, in order to break them. Strunk & White, introduced to me by my sophomore year high school English teacher, is the reason I enjoy writing at all. Prior to that, writing was a chore that I loathed. The Elements of Style is one of the few things from high school that I still remember specifically and, 35 years later, still use. To me it is the K&…

But the point is not only are what Strunk & White talk about not rules followed by good writers, they're not rules that have anything to do with English in the first place.

For instance, from my link:

> Strunk makes are foolish assertions like that however in the sense "nevertheless" cannot be correctly used to begin a sentence

Why is it that Strunk would assert this? On what basis? It's not rooted in any linguistic property of English. It's not even rooted in practices of respected writers. It's simply made-up, and about as reasonable as saying that one shouldn't begin sentences with words starting with 'Z'.

Post reply on HN