Long sentences

I love short sentences. They really hit the spot. They are easy to learn and, well, easy to master. Writing short sentences is like putting one foot in front of another. You can cover a lot of ground this way. Before you know it, you’re half way up the mountain. Just keep going. You’ll never lose your train of thought and you’ll always have the reader’s attention. What’s not to love? 

But you can’t just go on writing short sentences forever. You’ll also want to write sentences of medium length, sentences that may contain more than one clause (‘clause’ is just another word for subject and predicate). A medium length sentence is useful when you want to describe something in more detail or when you want to join together different ideas. You can use words like and, because, but, and or to connect parts of the sentence; you can also use a semi-colon, or a comma – or even a dash. 

Now, you’ve got to be careful with this kind of sentence because it’s more difficult to control, like a car towing a fully-loaded trailer. You’ve got to keep it slow and steady otherwise you might veer off the road and crash into a ditch. So, mix it up: write short sentences and write sentences of medium length. These will be your go-to sentences. 

But don’t be afraid to write long sentences, too. If a short sentence is like walking, and a medium one is like jogging, then a long sentence is like running a marathon. It requires training and endurance, and it’s not something you’ll want to do every day – but the reward can be enormous. The best kind of long sentences are driven by a sense of purpose, an inexorable inner logic. You’ll write a long sentence only when a long sentence is called for, when a short or medium length one just won’t do (which is rarely), and when the thought you wish to express demands to be extended, elongated, stretched out like dough – a feat that involves both patience and skill, because a long sentence takes effort to write but shouldn’t be an effort to read. That’s sixty-six words. Hopefully it didn’t feel like a schlep. 

A long sentence – let’s say, thirty words or more – is especially useful when you want to make a list, a cataloguing of related items. Here’s a passage from Hardt and Negri’s Empire, a book about global capitalism and its discontents: 

In Empire, corruption is everywhere. It is the cornerstone and keystone of domination. It resides in different forms in the supreme government of Empire and its vassal administration, the most refined and the most rotten administrative police forces, the lobbies of the ruling classes, the mafias of rising social groups, the churches and sects, the perpetrators and persecutors of scandal, the great financial conglomerates, and everyday economic transactions. Through corruption, imperial power extends a smokescreen across the world, and command over the multitude is exercised in this putrid cloud, in the absence of light and truth. (2000: 389) 

Ok, the prose is a bit purple. But consider the exquisite pacing of the paragraph: two short sentences (five words, eight words) followed by one long one (fifty-five words) and one of medium length (twenty-eight words). Short, short, long, medium. It’s like an algorithm for writing stand-out paragraphs. 

The authors declaim their main point as simply as possible (corruption is everywhere). They then provide an inventory of offenders, encompassing politics, economics, religion, and the law. The sentence is long because the corruption is so widespread – how else to convey its pervasiveness? But the sentence is easy to understand because it starts with the subject (it) and verb (resides), a pairing that grounds the rest of the sentence on terra firma. Unless you’re writing a left-branching sentence, and unless you wish to hold the reader in a state of tension until the very last moment, always start long sentences with a subject and verb. 

Most of the time, you’ll want to break up long sentences into shorter ones. This is one of the most effective tricks up any writer’s sleeve. As writers, we tend to overestimate the reader’s ability to comprehend the twists and turns in our thought on the page. So do the reader a favour and aim for sentences of twenty-five words or fewer. It’s not a bad rule of thumb. 

But sometimes you’ll want to craft a long sentence to achieve a special effect in your prose – an indexing of examples, a heightening of drama, a slowing down of action. And if you do, remember what Verlyn Klinkenborg says: a good long sentence is just a series of short sentences welded together. Learn how to write strong short sentences and you will, by extension, learn how to write good long ones too.