Write like you’re getting paid by the period.
That’s what I tell my journalism students when their sentences resemble corn mazes.
The per-period remuneration system wasn’t my idea. I stole it from Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker profile of crime reporter Edna Buchanan.
New York Timesman Dwight Garner explained the problem with long sentences in his recent review of Henry James’ “Autobiographies”:
“You hike backward along his snaking sentences, searching for antecedents to distant pronouns, while experiencing vague terrors, as if you should leave a trail of breadcrumbs. How else will you get safely home?”
And James knew what he was doing. Or did he? Here’s an example from “The Golden Bowl”:
“She had got up with these last words; she stood there before him with that particular suggestion in her aspect to which even the long habit of their life together had not closed his sense, kept sharp, year after year, by the collation of types and signs, the comparison of fine object with fine object, of one degree of finish, of one form of the exquisite with another–the appearance of some slight, slim draped ‘antique’ of Vatican or Capitoline halls, late and refined, rare as a note and immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred, absent eyes, the smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost in an alien age and passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase.”
Got that? Me neither. But it’s 165 words, 19 commas, two semi-colons and one dash, if you’re scoring.
Compare Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”:
“He stepped into the stream. It was a shock. His trousers clung tight to his legs. His shoes felt the gravel. The water was a rising cold shock.”
That’s five sentences totaling 28 words. And note: not a single comma.
James’ novel was published in 1904, Hemingway’s story in 1925. That’s a rather dramatic stylistic shift in two decades.
Hemingway didn’t vanquish the long sentence – a 142-worder can be found in Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” published in 2004 — but the Hemingwayesque subject-verb-object-I’m-outta-here approach has been the preferred style in American journalistic writing, if not in American prose writing generally, for the past century.
It’s a particularly good model for young writers who, like dogs tethered to a tree by a very long rope, get all tangled up in sentences more complicated than “The mouse ate the cheese.”
But for veteran, if not venerable, keyboard jockeys like myself, who might be so delusional as to claim to have achieved at least some degree of sentence-crafting mastery, terse Ernest has held sway long enough, and it is time for us to dispense with pith, restore the twisty-turny sentence to its rightful place as the true measure of the wordsmith’s art, and write as if we are to be paid by the comma.
There were seven of those cute little curlicues in the preceding sentence, the length of which ran to 73 words, which makes it the literary equivalent of a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, each comma a replay review, or a trip to the mound by a catcher, coach or manager, or David Ortiz stepping out of the box to knock imaginary dirt out of his cleats, needlessly tighten his batting gloves, spit into said gloves, and slap his hands together.
The long sentence revival fits the ethos of the slow movement – a reaction across an array of human activities to the accelerating pace of modern life that has manifested itself in fast food restaurants, microwaveable dinners, Quick Oats, Minute Rice, Jiffy Pop (or Lube), speed dating (and dialing), instant gratification (or karma), 24-second clocks, hurry-up offenses and, of course 140-character Tweets, all of which phenomena have privileged instantaneousness over quality, complexity, sustainability and depth to such a degree that no one has the patience or the attention span to cook or savor a meal, or read a book or even an in-depth piece of journalism, much less work their way through a 120–word, 15-comma mega-sentence such as this one.
Think of the long sentence as a float trip down (not up) a lazy river, one that may lack the thrills (and chills) of a whitewater rafting experience, but that offers the leisure to soak in the sun and the breeze, to commune with the frogs and fishes and waterfowl, above all, to contemplate, an activity essential to mental and spiritual wellbeing that has been hurried to the edge of extinction by our mania for speed and the relentless intrusions of digital technology.
Are you worried I’m going to write like this from now on?
You needn’t. I won’t.
