
In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence - JamesClear99
https://lithub.com/in-praise-of-the-long-and-complicated-sentence/
======
didgeoridoo
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, before the wheel,
before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills
bareback, it snowed and it snowed.” - A Child’s Christmas in Wales

~~~
mlthoughts2018
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.

~~~
losteric
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.

------
mirimir
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.

~~~
rangibaby
Your sentences should be as long or short as they need to be to communicate
clearly

~~~
mirimir
Exactly so.

~~~
jacobush
This.

~~~
coldtea
Yep.

~~~
mirimir
Da

------
chrismorgan
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, 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.

~~~
mirimir
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 ;)

------
wrycoder
“From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot
weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called
the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with
the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she
was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and
that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on
that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes
which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself
blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.” —
Absalom, Absalom by Faulkner

As The Edge builds a wall of sound, Faulkner builds a wall of words.

------
winchling
THAT praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due
only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always
continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence
from the heresies of paradox; or those, who, being forced by disappointment
upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the
present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet
denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time.

\-- Samuel Johnson, _Preface to Shakespeare_

------
jdeisenberg
My favorite long sentence is from “The Silent Eyes of Time,” by Algis Budrys:
“He was already, however, beginning to think of DC-3s, and then of tall white
cruise ships, and of a narrow winding street of steps that led to the house
where they played music on Victrolas with hand-joined, beautifully varnished
boxes, nickelled cranks, and fluted horns like Morning Glories confused by the
light from the great chandeliers and thus mistakenly uttering praise of a new
day.”

------
samizdatum
I'm pretty confident that Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, composed the greatest
single-sentence ode to toothpaste ever written:

"In the pipefitters’ sheds, icicled, rattling when the gales are in the
Straits, here’s thousands of used toothpaste tubes, heaped often to the
ceilings, thousands of somber man-made mornings made tolerable, transformed to
mint fumes and bleak song that left white spots across the quicksilver mirrors
from Harrow to Gravesend, thousands of children who pestled foam up out of
soft mortars of mouths, who lost easily a thousand times as many words among
the chalky bubbles–bed-going complaints, timid announcements of love, news of
fat or translucent, fuzzy or gentle beings from the country under the
counterpane–uncounted soapy-liquorice moments spat and flushed down to sewers
and the slow-scumming gray estuary, the morning mouths growing idle with the
day tobacco and fish-furred, dry with fear, foul with idleness, flooded at
thoughts of impossible meals, settling instead for the week’s offal in gland
pies, Household Milk, broken biscuits at half the usual points, and isn’t
menthol a marvelous invention to take just enough of it away each morning,
down to become dusty oversize bubbles tessellating tough and stagnant among
the tar shorelines, the intricate draftsmanship of outlets feeding,
multiplying out to sea, as one by one these old toothpaste tubes are emptied
and returned to the War, heaps of dimly fragrant metal, phantoms of peppermint
in the winter shacks, each tube wrinkled or embossed by the unconscious hands
of London, written over in interference-patterns, hand against hand, waiting
now–it is true return–to be melted for solder, for plate, alloyed for
castings, bearings, gasketry, hidden smokeshriek linings the children of that
other domestic incarnation will never see."

------
Udik
Rather ironic that this post or short essay is completely written in 8 - 10
words sentences. The full stop comes way too often, making the text a constant
stop-and-go, like a car stuck in traffic. Is it because of a certain
unwillingness to talk that the author mutters each sentence between his teeth?
Or is it for assertiveness- each full stop making a statement, as axioms and
lemmas of a theorem to prove?

------
munchbunny
My experience with writing long and complicated sentences is that I don't have
the skill to write good ones, and neither do most people. Instead, I follow
the rule of thumb that my college writing instructor taught: aim for an
average of about 20 words, vary your sentence length, and try to say what
needs to be said and no more.

------
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.

~~~
coliveira
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.

------
karaokeyoga
“The light had now completely failed and he stared over Sr. Bustamente’s
shoulder past the curtain into a graveyard darkness, stabbed by flashes of
torchlight like heat lightning, but the vendors had lowered their voices, the
children had stopped laughing and crying while the diminished audience sat
slackly and bored yet patient before the dark screen, suddenly illuminated,
swept, by silent grotesque shadows of giants and spears and birds, then dark
again, the men along the right-hand balcony, who hadn’t bothered to move or
come downstairs, a solid dark frieze carved into the wall, serious,
moustachioed men, warriors waiting for the show to begin, for a glimpse of the
murderer’s bloodstained hands.” — Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

------
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.

------
lucas_membrane
“We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them
philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with
utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and
political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be
believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine
have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak
into his own weary and distracted head." \-- William H. Gass

------
artificialLimbs
I see no mention of Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson" here, so
here is mention. The entire book is an tour de force of long and complicated
sentenceness.

------
clairity
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.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
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](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15509)

~~~
svat
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...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2909/what-s-purportedly-
wrong-with-strunk-white-s-the-elements-of-style/3223#3223)

~~~
_emacsomancer_
As a stylistic claim, their statement about _however_ is also incorrect. They
could have easily turned up examples of this exact use from well-regarded
writers over the last few centuries. On what basis is using _however_ at the
beginning of a main clause with the sense of 'nevertheless' unclear or
careless?

A worse example of 'careless writing' is writing about things you don't
actually have much idea about, but with an air of authority.

~~~
svat
Yes of course, for every single rule stated in any decent style guide, one can
find examples of that rule being violated by well-regarded writers; often even
the authors. That's what style guides are. What they contain are not "claims",
but the authors' whimsical opinions, based on what they consider infelicitous
in the writing they often encounter (in the case of Strunk, his students'
essays).

You could carry out this exact exercise with any style guide, even a bland and
inoffensive one like the Chicago Manual of Style (which barely even gets into
stylistic issues). The books to compare Strunk & White with are not grammar
textbooks (I don't know why Pullum keeps doing this) but things like Steven
Pinker's _A Sense of Style_ or Ben Yagoda's _The Sound on the Page_ or
Zinsser's _On Writing Well_ or Stephen King's _On Writing: A Memoir of the
Craft_ etc.

I have said all this in the answer I linked to in the comment above (and
comments on other answers at that question), so now I'll stop getting drawn
into the same argument again. :-)

~~~
_emacsomancer_
But I'm not talking about isolated examples, which you keeping trying to pull
the discussion back to, I'm talking about widespread, 'good style' usage. What
S&W recommend is simply _bad_ style, and I (like Pullum) wish people would
stop recommending it.

~~~
svat
Now that's new. All the objections I've heard so far, from Pullum and from
you, were about the fact that the rules stated by Strunk & White are not rules
of grammar and are often violated by good writers including the authors, etc.
As I've said, that is a nonsensical objection that rests on a misunderstanding
of what a style guide is.

But what you seem to be saying _now_ is that if someone follows the
recommendations of S&W (and in the way intended by a style guide, i.e. not
blindly), their writing will amount to "bad style". Now we're actually
discussing style (matters of taste), not grammar -- that's great!

Of course tastes differ so this is fully to be expected, but I'm curious: do
you have examples of why you think that what they recommend is _bad_ style? If
it helps, and so that we can discuss something concrete, the original 1918
_The Elements of Style_ is available online:
[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134)
\-- it takes less than an hour to read, and even less to skim. (At least its
"I. INTRODUCTORY" is well worth reading, to set the book in context.)

My opinion: It is hard to define any writer's style, but overall, the style
advocated by Strunk is one of clear ("plain"), concise, and "direct" language.
Of course literary writing need not conform to this style, but in most cases
it serves well. For most of the examples in the book, although it is easy to
imagine situations where a sentence similar to the "before" case would be
better than the suggested fix, overall it seems to me that in most cases the
changes would be an improvement. (And in some cases the book itself points out
contradictory rules explicitly, e.g. Rule 4 and Rule 14.) One only needs to
look at the very last section of the book (Exercises 9 to 25) to see how such
awkward writing is still very common today, especially in writing by students,
and how Strunk's recommended style would improve things.

------
ian0
Im going to resist the urge to copy/past Molly Blooms soliloquy here but for
those who like particularly long sentences its quite the read.

[https://archive.org/stream/MollyBloomMonologEnd/MollyBloomMo...](https://archive.org/stream/MollyBloomMonologEnd/MollyBloomMonologhyEnd_djvu.txt)

------
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!

~~~
cafard
Ah, yes. Nothing like Hegel, with one half of the separable verb on page _n_
near the top, and the other half near the bottom of page _n_ \+ 2.

~~~
wrycoder
Said the tedious German lecturer to the couple who stood up to go after twenty
minutes: “Don't leave yet, I’m just getting to the verb!”

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

~~~
speedplane
> 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.

------
celias
T. 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.

------
curuinor
it'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...](https://twitter.com/eugen_levine/status/834865006705512449?lang=en)

------
logicallee
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.)

