Itchy Bitesized 37: Six Things About Sentences

And how to develop your sentence-wrangling skills

1. Shorter sentences don’t necessarily make the storytelling move faster. True, they often feel punchier. Like a punch they also stop the reader dead. You’ll want the reader to experience that sometimes. But to feel that stop every time? Always? Maybe not. Done well, prose made of short sentences has the strength of simplicity. Done badly, it reads as simple-minded, childish or even patronising.

2. Longer sentences don’t necessarily slow the storytelling. Because the meaning continues to emerge with only a slight lift at commas and the like, this kind of prose can actually make things feel faster and more profluent, leading the reader towards the climax of really experiencing the full power of a long sentence. Reading good long sentences is like riding a forward-moving horse; reading bad ones is like wading through tangly undergrowth.

   

   Photo by Raphael Renter | @raphi_rawr on Unsplash

3. Short sentences are not the same as sentence fragments, though they can have a similar effect.

   1. A complete sentence has a grammatical subject and a main verb: Jo baked. which together form an independent clause. It may also have other elements: John baked a cake. Jago baked for their mother. Judith baked skillfully. A cake was baked¹ by Jeremiah. Each of these can stand on its own, needing nothing more to express a full meaning.

   2. A sentence fragment is missing either main verb or subject: John a cake, Josh for his mother, baked skillfully, was baked by Jeremiah are not independent clauses, and their meaning is incomplete. Isolating a scrap like that can be effective, but the more scraps you have, the quicker the effect weakens.

4. A long sentence gives you scope to connect meaning and implications, and control how things are revealed to the reader. More about sentence order here.

   1. Long sentences need not be harder to understand if you learn to build them properly. If they do ask a little more of the reader, that can create desirable difficulty which actually increases your reader’s engagement rather than hampering it.

   2. There are, essentially, three kinds of longer sentence, and it’s worth understanding the difference. (I’ve been a bit lavish with the commas in what follows, to make the separate clauses clear):

      1. Simple sentences. Even a sentence with only one subject and one main verb can be quite long: John happily baked a delicious cake for his wonderful girlfriend Anne.

      2. Compound sentences string together a series of independent clauses, using either semi-colons or a coordinating conjuctions: John happily baked a delicious cake for his girlfriend Anne, but she arrived home late; he ate it all himself.

      3. Complex sentences connect at least one main, independent clause with one or more dependent clauses: When the rain began sluicing down, John baked a cake for Anne, who didn’t get home till very late, suppressing furious anger, because the trains had been delayed.²

5. Wrangling sentences, including exploiting and controlling length, is a craft skill well worth learning. Quite apart from stoytelling reasons, varying your sentence lengths, as Paul Kix quotes Gary Provost saying, ‘makes music’. (That’s a very good post on the value of reading aloud, which I also explored here.)

6. Ways to develop your sentence-wrangling skills:

   1. Sentence Yoga: (For more yoga-for-writers, click here)

      1. Pick a longish sentence of your own, and see how many versions you can come up with without changing the meaning. My example is here.

      2. Pick a paragraph of your own, and play with it, experimenting with connecting the elements up in different ways, moving clauses around, chopping things up or gluing them together.

   2. Try John Gardner’s classic exercise from The Art of Fiction: ‘Write three effective long sentences: each at least one full typed page (250 words), each involving a different emotion (for example, anger, pensiveness, sorrow, joy). Purpose: control of tone in a complex sentence.’

   3. When you’re reading, pick a paragraph that has a strong effect, and experiment with moving the clauses around and connecting them up differently. It’s not about making things ‘better’ or ‘worse’, it’s just to develop your sense of the different effects that result.

   4. When you’re writing, be willing to play with individual sentences until they’re really singing (or thumping, or burbling… until they’re absolutely right, in other words). My own example of this kind of wrangling is here.³

To my mind, long sentences are like the flow of a wrestling bout or a good run in a rugby match: they have, if you like, a narrative arc. Reading prose made of short sentences is more like watching a series of arrow shots or javelin throws: they’re connected by the occasion and the protagonists, but to some extent each is a standalone event: if there is an arc, it’s one the spectators and commentators make for themselves. And then, of course, there’s the one-two of boxing, which is somewhere between the two.

Your job is to develop your understanding and control of all the possibilities,⁴ and use each to best effect.

1. For more about passive voice verbs, click here.

2. It is possible for a sentence to be both compound and complex: to contain both independent and dependent clauses. But it will always have a main clause, so it’s worth hunting that down.

3. The sentence I was wrangling in that post was actually from The Bruegel Boy, but at that point I wasn’t willing to talk about the novel so I changed the names.

4. For some more books about sentences, try some of these:

• How to Write a Sentence; and how to read one by Stanley Fish

• Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau; translated by Barbara Wright; foreword by Umberto Eco; with an essay by Italo Calvino

• The Elements of Eloquence: how to turn the perfect English phrase by Mark Forsyth

• Reading Like A Writer: a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them by Francine Prose

• Practical English Usage by Michael Swan

• Spellbinding Sentences by Barbara Baig