THERE ARE good reasons to keep sentences brief. Short sentences pack a punch. They impose a healthy discipline. They force writers to order their ideas. They clarify the succession of thoughts. But short sentences get boring. Nothing breaks the cadence. Readers long for variety.
Extended sentences, on the other hand, can begin simply enough but then gradually unspool into maddening explorations you struggle to follow as they dip and swerve and loop back on themselves, forcing you to try to keep in mind what you’ve already read while making mental adjustments to this burgeoning succession of ideas, which may be strung together in unexpected ways, or interrupted here and there by qualifications or detours the writer includes to highlight exceptions, or to draw attention to specific examples (which may end up being as distracting as they are illuminating and so leave you with the written equivalent of an overstuffed suitcase that’s almost impossible to zip shut), all of it becoming in the end a maelstrom of words and phrases and clauses concocted by a writer perhaps seeking to impress readers with the sophisticated meanderings of his mind—which, in the case of tortuous sentences like this one, is not the likely outcome.
Hard-boiled private eyes speak in monosyllables. Huh. Really. Terse sentences. “You don’t say.” “Maybe I did.” So, in places, does Prince Harry. In his book. Spare. Bestseller. Ghost-written.
William Faulkner, by contrast, includes in Absalom Absalom! a sentence of almost 1,300 words. There have been whole novels—Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal, for example, and Solar Bones by Mike McCormack—that consist entirely of a single sentence. James Joyce breaks Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy in Ulysses into a mere two sentences that together run to 35 pages.
LAW AND POLITICS are bastions of sentences so long that they become hard to comprehend, and many jurisdictions are now either imposing or flirting with plain-language legislation. The idea is to force bureaucrats and lawmakers to provide information in terms readily understood by someone with a Grade 6 (or 7 or 8, depending on jurisdiction) education and vocabulary. One instruction on the B.C. government’s plain-language checklist is: Write short sentences. Ideally no more than 15 to 20 words. Maybe one day clunkers like this 90-word judgement will, as a matter of course, be broken down into digestible chunks:
The District Court found no different than did the Essex County Court in regard to the definition of a motor vehicle and stated that “what may be considered a motor vehicle for one statute may not necessarily be considered a motor vehicle for another” and even without considering the issue of vagueness declared that “considering the plain and clear meaning of the terms used in the applicable definitional statutes as would be understood by a person of ordinary intelligence, we find that the lawn mower is a ‘motor vehicle.’”
Journalists, too, often produce sentences that take some backtracking to understand. Jason Kirby (sorry, Jason, couldn’t figure out how to black out your byline) and his editor (if you had one) are guilty as charged:
Sometimes, though, long sentences serve the writer’s purpose without overly challenging the reader. Here’s a barrage of cumulative outrage that would be diminished, I think, if it were broken into shorter bits:
“With the old media gatekeepers gone, right-wing content creators rushed in and filled the world with QAnon kookery on Facebook, conspiracy theories powerful enough to vault the cretinous likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene into Congress, fake news sponsored by Moscow and Beijing and fake-ish news subsidized by Viktor Orban and his happy junta, and whatever kind of poison butterfly Tucker Carlson is going to be when he emerges from the chrysalis of filth he’s built around himself.”
OR HOW ABOUT this sentence, published after the OceanGate disaster that took place as the Titan submersible descended toward the wreck of the Titanic. Is it too long?
“After debris from the Titan was discovered on the ocean floor, marine scientists were quick to conclude that, due to the extreme pressure on the vessel’s exterior (roughly 850 psi, or 37 times atmospheric pressure), the submersible had suffered a catastrophic implosion, which would have caused the five people on board to die instantly without realizing they were about to perish.”
If you broke those 60 words into discrete units, you might end up with something like this:
“Debris from the Titan was discovered on the ocean floor. Marine scientists quickly concluded that the submersible had suffered a catastrophic implosion. The vessel imploded because of extreme pressure on its exterior (roughly 850 psi, or 37 times atmospheric pressure). The five people on board would have died instantly. They would not have been aware they were about to perish.”
Is that preferable? To my mind, the first version—the single sentence—has a pleasing cadence and an unforced momentum; it links together phrases and clauses without hindering the reader’s comprehension. The five-sentence version, on the other hand, delivers factual information in a way that may be easier to recall, but feels a bit choppy and disjointed.
YOUR JOB when you write is to make yourself understood to your reader. How well you succeed depends partly on who that reader is. But it also depends considerably on your own depth of knowledge, command of language, and personal taste— all of which merge, when you’ve been writing for awhile, into an identifiable prose style.
Sentence length is just one of many decisions you make, without consciously thinking about them, as you commit words to the page. It’s an important decision because it deeply colours your writing. Short sentences feel clear and forceful. Longer sentences allow for a more nuanced and orchestrated way of describing things, or advancing an argument, or delivering information. Using sentences of different lengths is a good idea because it makes the reading experience more varied, unpredictable, and rich.
Back to the question atop this page. How long should a sentence be? There’s no right answer, of course, but here’s a good rule of thumb: a sentence is probably too long if the reader, on reaching the end of it, can’t remember how it began.
P.S. Happy holidays to all the Ross Rules faithful!
See you back here in the New Year.
I thought at first the long cumulative outrage sentence was from Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, but when I searched the index I didn't find it, so it must have been written by someone else who is outraged by being sucked into what she calls "the Mirror World." Outrage tends to be expressed in long sentences. I, too, like the Oceangate sentence the way it is. Cheers, Gary.