putting together something for a client today and i was reminded of one of the best-paced sentence-level pieces of writing i have ever read, coming from The Course of Honor by Lindsey Davis (chapter twenty-two).
By the time the last squadrons of auxiliary soldiers had left the Field of Mars, the magistrates were just approaching the Capitol. The long procession snaked through the Flaminian Circus, and entered the city through the Triumphal Gate, which was opened especially for the day. Following the Via Triumphalis, it wound past the theaters in the Ninth District to give as many folk as possible a decent view, made a complete circut to the right around the Palatine, included the Circus Maximus, turned left at the Caelian Hill, took the Sacred Way into the Forum, passed along the southern side, then ascended Capitol Hill by the steep approach of the Clivus Capitolinus, up to the Temple of Jupiter at the heart of the Citadel. So Rome saw the army; the army saw most of Rome. Everything moved at a dismal crawl. The whole city was at a stand-still. The noise was incredible. The spectacle took the best part of a day.
the way she makes use of sentence length here is a master class in how to do it. not only does she clearly identify exactly where in physical space this triumph is happening—so even if you don't know the layout of rome, you can grasp that this triumph is huge just from the sheer number of individual places named—as well as the time ("took the best part of a day"), her sentences themselves reinforce the time and space.
each sentence is in a different color above, and look at how the individual sentence length helps to impart the impact of the triumphal parade. the physical length of the parade is given in one incredibly long sentence (79 words! 7 commas!) but then the impact on individuals watching it, who would be overwhelmed by the heat and the noise and the time taken, are all short. they're frustrated. they're tired. they're emphatic.
the word choice too—contrasting negative and positive terms such as dismal and incredible and spectacle in such a way as to make all of them negatively associated in the narrator's voice—does a ton of work to make the reader understand what's happening here with very little actual physical description of what's being seen or heard.
i've been teaching this book on a craft level for most of a decade and i still am just. floored. by the amount of stuff Davis does with her sentence structure and paragraph length and word choice.
