#sentence length

[rivrains]

The most memorable way to learn sentence structure, by Gary Provost! I have shared this with so many folks. It’s now time to put it where I can find it! Read it, share it, adhere to it. Your writing will come alive!

[aibidil]

omg that sentence is insane! i felt myself running out of breath and i was only reading it in my head!! crazy how we take such cues from punctuation

ISN’T THAT WILD how a long sentence can set up a breathless sense of urgency?!!?!?!?! Here’s some more from the amazing Ursula Le Guin about sentence length:

“Teachers trying to get kids to write understandably, textbooks of style with their notion of “transparent” style, journalists with their weird rules and superstitions, and bang-pow thriller writers—they’ve all helped fill a lot of heads with the notion that the only good sentences is a short sentence.

A convicted criminal might agree. I don’t. 

And the pity of it is that people not only can’t write complex sentences, they can’t read them. “Oh, I can’t read Dickens, it’s all long sentences.” We are losing our literature to a dumbing-down process.

Very short sentences, isolated or in a series, are highly effective in the right place. Prose consisting entirely of short, syntactically simple sentences is monotonous, choppy, irritating. If short-sentence prose goes on very long, whatever its content, the thump-thump beat gives it a false simplicity that soon just sounds stupid. See Spot. See Jane. See Spot bite Jane.

It’s a myth that short-sentence prose is “more like the way we speak.” A writer can build a sentence in a more deliberate way than a speaker can, because a writer can ponder and revise. But people often use more long, well-articulated sentences when they speak than when they write. We follow a complex though aloud by using a wealth of clauses and qualifiers. …

Narrative prose consisting largely of long, complex sentences, full of embedded clauses and all the rest of the syntactical armature, takes some care. Long sentences have to be carefully and knowledgeably managed, solidly constructed; their connections must be clear, so that they flow, carrying the reader along easily. The marvelously supple connection of complex syntax are like the muscles and sinews of a long-distance runner’s body, ready to set up a good pace and keep going.

There is no optimum sentence length. The optimum is variety. The length of a sentence in good prose is established by contrast and interplay with the sentences around it—and by what it says and does.”

[speakwritestudio-blog]

Sentence Variation: How to be Very Varied.

[carterashofficial]

Writing Tip

This sentence is five words.

It is an exciting sentence.

Now put the humor aside.

Five words is too short.

The sentences are very choppy.

All are the same length.

Five words to a sentence.

No matter the word’s length.

It gets boring pretty fast.

But here is the thing.

This sentence is now seven words long.

When you add variety, it gets exciting, spices things up.

But.

Be careful.

Because with sentence length, you have to be careful with the attention span of the reader; be wary of exhausting them with dramatic run-ons and burdening the sentence with commas and semi-colons and dashes and parenthesis because in doing so; there is a risk of creating such a sentence that the reader will grow dreadfully ill-willed towards the offending paragraph-length monstrosity and the reader might become bored, losing interest in the writing itself, most especially when the majority of the sentences have a decent amount of length and the short choppy five-worded ones are sparse at best, leaving the reader to find the energy to exert their mind into marathon after marathon of sentences that are back-to-back and appear like a never-ending freight train of words that get heavily the longer thee sentence goes on.

This sentence is five words.

It’s refreshing.

Especially after that paragraph above.

The point is that sentence length is just as important as the words themselves.

This isn’t to say that an incredibly long sentence isn’t useful in some cases. In fact, they are useful. But be mindful of how many there are; and to follow them up with a short one. Give the reader a moment to let their inner voice catch their breath.

Not every sentence needs to be a gigantic declaration brimmed with dramatic writing.

Some can be five words.

Or less.

[johnesimpson]

Relaxing on the Rubble of an Avalanche of Words

Eleanor Catton, Philip Terman, et al.: 'Relaxing on the Rubble of an Avalanche of Words'

[Image: “Artifact,” by John E. Simpson.] From whiskey river: The Summer You Read Proust Remember the summer you read Proust? In the hammock tied to the apple trees your daughters climbed, their shadows merging with the shadows of the leaves spilling onto those long arduous sentences, all afternoon and into the evening—robins, jays, the distant dog, the occasional swaying, the way the hours rocked…

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[spen-still-spinning]

So I'm just writing a story and I noticed sentence length in the dialogue and made a note of how each character tends to speak and my favorite part is taking those little notes and extending them, not even writing, but one of the characters usually has really long run-on sentences and honestly all my posts tend to be like that

[rohirric-hunter]

Hot take: There’s no such thing as “purple prose”, just different people’s tolerance for adjectives.

[teacherscrapbook]

Varying your sentence length

‘Sentence length is  another matter. Novice writers vary their sentence structure too much, but their sentence lengths too little. A good trick, when drafting a piece, is to press enter after every sentence, as if you were writing a poem and each full stop marked a line break. This renders the varied (or unvaried) lengths of your sentences instantly visible...

...Nicholas Tomalin, in his advice to neophyte journalists, pointed out that you got high marks for style if you just alternated long sentences with short ones. One of his teachers at Bryanston School, John Royds, had given him this tip when he became editor of the school magazine. Tomalin dispensed the advice casually, as if it were a weary hack’s shortcut - and it is tru that alternating short and long sentences sounds so easy that it should come across as a mere trick. But no. It works every time.’ 

- Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence, pp. 180-1