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In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

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Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#31

Post by mirimir »

chrismorgan wrote: post #18

My 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, an…

Yes, that's sweet.

In Rajaniemi's "Flower Prince" novels, there's the idea that stories can infect you, taking over your consciousness with a foreign "self-loop" (which I guess is a reference to Hofstadter). Sort of like that song that you can't get out of your head.

But then, that's not very surprising. After binge reading a good novel, I start to think like my favorite characters. I've gone through periods where I think a lot like Logen or Caine. Even Sand dan Glokta ;)

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#32

Post by svat »

_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

Pullum (the author of the above) keeps criticizing Strunk's The Elements of Style (a style guide) for its rules not being rules of grammar, when the whole point of a style guide is to state opinions in cases where both alternatives are in fact grammatically correct, except that the author prefers one less. This activity of Pullum's is very strange, as he has written a book of grammar and is presumably capable of seeing that Strunk & White is not in the same category.

And in fact many of the claims Pullum makes about Strunk & White do not hold up to the slightest scrutiny: take for example the case of “however” (that you quoted in a reply below): Pullum says

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

but in fact the section in which Strunk mentions this starts with “Many of the words and expressions here listed are not so much bad English as bad style, the commonplaces of careless writing” and if you look at the other examples it's abundantly clear that Strunk is not making grammatical claims as Pullum alleges.

Longer answer of mine here: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2909/what-s-purp...

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#33

Post by losteric »

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…

The college student would be regarded as pretentious because they can't follow through with the expectations set by that sentence. They haven't developed a mastery of all the techniques and an intuition around using/abusing rules to enhance the reader's experience. A student could create that sentence, but they could not create the story.

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#34

Post by newsbinator »

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.

In fiction, catching 50% - 75% of the payload on a long sentence is pretty good, especially for the first read-through. Mixed metaphors and wandering trains and all that.

In scientific and technical writing, catching 50% - 75% of the payload on a sentence is how human casualties happen.

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#35

Post by coliveira »

speedplane wrote: post #25

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…

There is a Portuguese writer called José Saramago who wrote entire books without a single punctuation mark. He took full advantage of the confusion between beginnings and endings of sentences.

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#36

Post by coliveira »

Many people wrote long sentences, but the true master of this art is the French novelist Marcel Proust. Not only each sentence was a masterpiece, his main novel spans seven volumes. Of course, it is not easy read, but it is definitely one of the best books ever written.

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#38

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

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…

This is exactly what I thought of Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee.

Someone else could have written that book, and we'd all be better off for it having never been published.

I wonder if I'll ever try to reread it hoping I missed something.

Re: In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

#40

Post by jhanschoo »

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…

Honestly, it just has little place in a typical college essay. For a software analogy, you have quite a bit of freedom how you want to build your own personal project, but ought to follow standard style and technologies once people need to rely on understanding your code.
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