In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence | Hacker News Reader

In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

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80 pointsJamesClear9956 comments

Dylan Thomas was always good for a few of these.

“Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.” - A Child’s Christmas in Wales

I feel like if a college student had originally written this, or some more modern equivalent, it would have been shit on as sanctimonious with a needless wistfulness about it that feels like it’s straining to sound grand. I can just so easily see my old rhetoric teacher reading a line like, “jawbones of deacons” or “birds the color of red-flannel petticoats” from a student’s essay and just thinking come on, be a grown up, stop trying to sound like a big grown up writer.

I don’t say this to be critical of this passage at all. It just makes me feel like literary acclaim is just super random fashion signalling. When one person writes foo bar baz, we pay people lots of money to relive it on a stage and revere it as classic. Someone else could have totally thought to write foo bar baz in some other circumstance and be told they’re some simulacrum wanna-be spewing out overwrought drivel. It just seems so random.

The college student would be regarded as pretentious because they can't follow through with the expectations set by that sentence. They haven't developed a mastery of all the techniques and an intuition around using/abusing rules to enhance the reader's experience. A student could create that sentence, but they could not create the story.

Because language is always going to depend on context. If a college student in 2018 writes like that then they are probably being pretentious and deserve some criticism. It seems a little dismissive to call it fashion signaling.

Honestly, it just has little place in a typical college essay. For a software analogy, you have quite a bit of freedom how you want to build your own personal project, but ought to follow standard style and technologies once people need to rely on understanding your code.

This is exactly what I thought of Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee.

Someone else could have written that book, and we'd all be better off for it having never been published.

I wonder if I'll ever try to reread it hoping I missed something.

Even reduced to its most basic form I find it moving. Drawing it out so long and so forcefully really drives a point of passion home. Thanks for sharing this!

If you haven't heard it yet try Under Milk Wood. Especially the version narrated by Richard Burton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gymiPlOqsY0, and here is a BBC article about the play 60 years later: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-25877064.

It's magical, I can still remember my senior high school English teacher playing it to us in 1971 and the whole class falling silent as the words washed over us.

Long, but not particularly complicated.

My favourite long sentence, from A. A. Milne, is self-aware:

> In after-years he liked to think that he had been in Very Great Danger during the Terrible Flood, but the only danger he had really been in was in the last half-hour of his imprisonment, when Owl, who had just flown up, sat on a branch of his tree to comfort him, and told him a very long story about an aunt who had once laid a seagull’s egg by mistake, and the story went on and on, rather like this sentence, until Piglet who was listening out of his window without much hope, went to sleep quietly and naturally, slipping slowly out of the window towards the water until he was only hanging on by his toes, at which moment luckily, a sudden loud squawk from Owl, which was really part of the story, being what his aunt said, woke the Piglet up and just gave him time to jerk himself back into safety and say, “How interesting, and did she?” when—well, you can imagine his joy when at last he saw the good ship, The Brain of Pooh (Captain, C. Robin; Ist Mate, P. Bear) coming over the sea to rescue him.

> And as that is really the end of the story, and I am very tired after that last sentence, I think I shall stop there.

Yes, that's sweet.

In Rajaniemi's "Flower Prince" novels, there's the idea that stories can infect you, taking over your consciousness with a foreign "self-loop" (which I guess is a reference to Hofstadter). Sort of like that song that you can't get out of your head.

But then, that's not very surprising. After binge reading a good novel, I start to think like my favorite characters. I've gone through periods where I think a lot like Logen or Caine. Even Sand dan Glokta ;)

Yes, long sentences can be great, in fiction. They're rather like wandering trains of thought. With sequences of phrases that evoke shifting perspectives, feelings, etc.

But long sentences in scientific and technical writing can be impenetrable. Sort of like stand-alone proofs. Or even code, which must essentially be parsed. That stuff, I'd rather see broken out in a list or outline. And in fact, I sometimes do that.

In a paragraph that presents a line of reasoning, long sentences are great for connecting one thought to the next, or for connecting several thoughts together, without a full stop in between, thus driving the readers forward with the development of the thesis toward a climactic statement of a conclusion as the paragraph ends.

Your sentences should be as long or short as they need to be to communicate clearly

Exactly so.

This.

I reflexively downvote "This.". This time I didn't.

Yep.

On a more farcical note, the Dark And Stormy Night purple prose awards are, as many will learn, an annual compost-laden hotbed of long complicated sentences.

https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/latest-winners

>>> "He blended with the bleak city storefronts as people fled the cold, hard rain that sounded like a funeral dirge on an unforgiving sidewalk, seen yet unseen, someone yet no one, and like a lion stalking a weakened wildebeest from the tall grass of the Serengeti, he sprang toward a beautiful woman struggling to find purchase in her high heels and handed out another coupon for twenty percent off at Sneaker Jungle."

In fiction, catching 50% - 75% of the payload on a long sentence is pretty good, especially for the first read-through. Mixed metaphors and wandering trains and all that.

In scientific and technical writing, catching 50% - 75% of the payload on a sentence is how human casualties happen.

“From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.” — Absalom, Absalom by Faulkner

As The Edge builds a wall of sound, Faulkner builds a wall of words.

THAT praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox; or those, who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time.

-- Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

My favorite long sentence is from “The Silent Eyes of Time,” by Algis Budrys: “He was already, however, beginning to think of DC-3s, and then of tall white cruise ships, and of a narrow winding street of steps that led to the house where they played music on Victrolas with hand-joined, beautifully varnished boxes, nickelled cranks, and fluted horns like Morning Glories confused by the light from the great chandeliers and thus mistakenly uttering praise of a new day.”

I'm pretty confident that Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, composed the greatest single-sentence ode to toothpaste ever written:

"In the pipefitters’ sheds, icicled, rattling when the gales are in the Straits, here’s thousands of used toothpaste tubes, heaped often to the ceilings, thousands of somber man-made mornings made tolerable, transformed to mint fumes and bleak song that left white spots across the quicksilver mirrors from Harrow to Gravesend, thousands of children who pestled foam up out of soft mortars of mouths, who lost easily a thousand times as many words among the chalky bubbles–bed-going complaints, timid announcements of love, news of fat or translucent, fuzzy or gentle beings from the country under the counterpane–uncounted soapy-liquorice moments spat and flushed down to sewers and the slow-scumming gray estuary, the morning mouths growing idle with the day tobacco and fish-furred, dry with fear, foul with idleness, flooded at thoughts of impossible meals, settling instead for the week’s offal in gland pies, Household Milk, broken biscuits at half the usual points, and isn’t menthol a marvelous invention to take just enough of it away each morning, down to become dusty oversize bubbles tessellating tough and stagnant among the tar shorelines, the intricate draftsmanship of outlets feeding, multiplying out to sea, as one by one these old toothpaste tubes are emptied and returned to the War, heaps of dimly fragrant metal, phantoms of peppermint in the winter shacks, each tube wrinkled or embossed by the unconscious hands of London, written over in interference-patterns, hand against hand, waiting now–it is true return–to be melted for solder, for plate, alloyed for castings, bearings, gasketry, hidden smokeshriek linings the children of that other domestic incarnation will never see."

My experience with writing long and complicated sentences is that I don't have the skill to write good ones, and neither do most people. Instead, I follow the rule of thumb that my college writing instructor taught: aim for an average of about 20 words, vary your sentence length, and try to say what needs to be said and no more.

Punctuation is what separates one sentence from another. If you believe that long sentences can be beautiful, you're not far off from believing that removing punctuation can bring benefits too.

A lack of punctuation can be especially beneficial in dialog. People don't converse in quotes and grammatically correct pauses. Conversation often flows back and forth, without direct responses to previous statements. There is often an underlying confusion to dialog, and when we impose punctuation around it, you lose something.

Consider the difference between: "You gonna do it tonight?" "Didn't you hear? You know he's going to be there."

And: You gonna do it tonight Didn't you hear - you know he's going to be there

There is an element of confusion of intent in the latter that can add to a story.

There is a Portuguese writer called José Saramago who wrote entire books without a single punctuation mark. He took full advantage of the confusion between beginnings and endings of sentences.

“The light had now completely failed and he stared over Sr. Bustamente’s shoulder past the curtain into a graveyard darkness, stabbed by flashes of torchlight like heat lightning, but the vendors had lowered their voices, the children had stopped laughing and crying while the diminished audience sat slackly and bored yet patient before the dark screen, suddenly illuminated, swept, by silent grotesque shadows of giants and spears and birds, then dark again, the men along the right-hand balcony, who hadn’t bothered to move or come downstairs, a solid dark frieze carved into the wall, serious, moustachioed men, warriors waiting for the show to begin, for a glimpse of the murderer’s bloodstained hands.” — Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

Many people wrote long sentences, but the true master of this art is the French novelist Marcel Proust. Not only each sentence was a masterpiece, his main novel spans seven volumes. Of course, it is not easy read, but it is definitely one of the best books ever written.

“We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head." -- William H. Gass

I see no mention of Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson" here, so here is mention. The entire book is an tour de force of long and complicated sentenceness.

i find it amusing that the essay alludes to the succinct-sentence-prescribing style guide, the elements of style, written by strunk & white (of charlotte's web fame), whose affiliiated institution also produced thomas pynchon, a writer whose meticulous verbosity may know no bounds but also produced some fascinatingly long sentences.

Strunk & White is, of course, nonsense and doesn't even follow its own made-up rules most of the time. See, e.g., http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15509

Pullum (the author of the above) keeps criticizing Strunk's The Elements of Style (a style guide) for its rules not being rules of grammar, when the whole point of a style guide is to state opinions in cases where both alternatives are in fact grammatically correct, except that the author prefers one less. This activity of Pullum's is very strange, as he has written a book of grammar and is presumably capable of seeing that Strunk & White is not in the same category.

And in fact many of the claims Pullum makes about Strunk & White do not hold up to the slightest scrutiny: take for example the case of “however” (that you quoted in a reply below): Pullum says

> the grammatical claims Strunk makes are foolish assertions like that however in the sense "nevertheless" cannot be correctly used to begin a sentence…

but in fact the section in which Strunk mentions this starts with “Many of the words and expressions here listed are not so much bad English as bad style, the commonplaces of careless writing” and if you look at the other examples it's abundantly clear that Strunk is not making grammatical claims as Pullum alleges.

Longer answer of mine here: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2909/what-s-purp...

As a stylistic claim, their statement about however is also incorrect. They could have easily turned up examples of this exact use from well-regarded writers over the last few centuries. On what basis is using however at the beginning of a main clause with the sense of 'nevertheless' unclear or careless?

A worse example of 'careless writing' is writing about things you don't actually have much idea about, but with an air of authority.

Yes of course, for every single rule stated in any decent style guide, one can find examples of that rule being violated by well-regarded writers; often even the authors. That's what style guides are. What they contain are not "claims", but the authors' whimsical opinions, based on what they consider infelicitous in the writing they often encounter (in the case of Strunk, his students' essays).

You could carry out this exact exercise with any style guide, even a bland and inoffensive one like the Chicago Manual of Style (which barely even gets into stylistic issues). The books to compare Strunk & White with are not grammar textbooks (I don't know why Pullum keeps doing this) but things like Steven Pinker's A Sense of Style or Ben Yagoda's The Sound on the Page or Zinsser's On Writing Well or Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft etc.

I have said all this in the answer I linked to in the comment above (and comments on other answers at that question), so now I'll stop getting drawn into the same argument again. :-)

But I'm not talking about isolated examples, which you keeping trying to pull the discussion back to, I'm talking about widespread, 'good style' usage. What S&W recommend is simply bad style, and I (like Pullum) wish people would stop recommending it.

Now that's new. All the objections I've heard so far, from Pullum and from you, were about the fact that the rules stated by Strunk & White are not rules of grammar and are often violated by good writers including the authors, etc. As I've said, that is a nonsensical objection that rests on a misunderstanding of what a style guide is.

But what you seem to be saying now is that if someone follows the recommendations of S&W (and in the way intended by a style guide, i.e. not blindly), their writing will amount to "bad style". Now we're actually discussing style (matters of taste), not grammar -- that's great!

Of course tastes differ so this is fully to be expected, but I'm curious: do you have examples of why you think that what they recommend is bad style? If it helps, and so that we can discuss something concrete, the original 1918 The Elements of Style is available online: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134 -- it takes less than an hour to read, and even less to skim. (At least its "I. INTRODUCTORY" is well worth reading, to set the book in context.)

My opinion: It is hard to define any writer's style, but overall, the style advocated by Strunk is one of clear ("plain"), concise, and "direct" language. Of course literary writing need not conform to this style, but in most cases it serves well. For most of the examples in the book, although it is easy to imagine situations where a sentence similar to the "before" case would be better than the suggested fix, overall it seems to me that in most cases the changes would be an improvement. (And in some cases the book itself points out contradictory rules explicitly, e.g. Rule 4 and Rule 14.) One only needs to look at the very last section of the book (Exercises 9 to 25) to see how such awkward writing is still very common today, especially in writing by students, and how Strunk's recommended style would improve things.

> doesn't even follow its own made-up rules

One must first know the rules, in order to break them.

Strunk & White, introduced to me by my sophomore year high school English teacher, is the reason I enjoy writing at all. Prior to that, writing was a chore that I loathed. The Elements of Style is one of the few things from high school that I still remember specifically and, 35 years later, still use. To me it is the K&R manual for writing.

But the point is not only are what Strunk & White talk about not rules followed by good writers, they're not rules that have anything to do with English in the first place.

For instance, from my link:

> Strunk makes are foolish assertions like that however in the sense "nevertheless" cannot be correctly used to begin a sentence

Why is it that Strunk would assert this? On what basis? It's not rooted in any linguistic property of English. It's not even rooted in practices of respected writers. It's simply made-up, and about as reasonable as saying that one shouldn't begin sentences with words starting with 'Z'.

They are not supposed to be gramatical rules. They are supposed to be style rules that makes normal person write better and to teach you to think about writing.

Of course it is made up. Style manuals are made up and not meant to be comprehensive list of everything possible.

That still doesn't address my point. If these are not rules of English, then what are these (style) rules based on? What is the justification for not using however at the beginning of a non-dependent clause ('sentence')? If it's not actual rules of English grammar and also not what writers that are generally recognised as 'good' writers do, then what value could it have?

It makes texts easier to read. Grammar is not about readability nor meaning nor pleasure, it is purely about syntax. Analogy is that syntactically correct code does not imply maintainability nor means the code is pleasant to work with.

Plenty of good writer followed those rules. Many of people break those rules and create completely crappy text. In here, few writers are cherry picked as examples why long sentences are fine - most of those sentences are for purely emotional hit and frankly, none of those sentences came across as somehow all that much awesome to me. They are the kind of sentences I normally glaze over.

Really, James Joyce breaks those rules, is considered good writer, but the fact is that most readers suffer as they attempt to read it. Now, you can go on trying to simulate what he did, but readers will suffer. He had success with it, because he knew why is he breaking the rules and had elaborate system for it.

You can have non-minimalist style and it can work well too. I think that simply in practice, people tend to use non-minimalist style when they don't know what they are doing and end up with long hard to understand texts.

---------------------

However part says something different then you think. According to book, however may mean either "nevertheless" or "whatever way or to whatever extent". When however comes first, it means in whatever way or to whatever extent. So, the explanation is in how they understood the meaning of the word depending of where it is placed in 1918. And you can use it, if you use the word with proper meaning.

Also, however is in chapter with following intro: "Many of the words and expressions here listed are not so much bad English as bad style, the commonplaces of careless writing. As illustrated under Feature, the proper correction is likely to be not the replacement of one word or set of words by another, but the replacement of vague generality by definite statement."

Elements of style have explanations in it and is free on the internet.

There are many things which are simply factually incorrect. However as 'not being able to mean "nevertheless" when at the beginning of a main clause' is utter fabricated balderdash.

It has been able to be used like this for at least a few hundred years in English, and you can find examples of this use from Shakespeare and Burke and so on. And it's not as if Strunk & White couldn't have checked on this in 1918, such examples are given in the OED's 1899 edition.

And this is not an explanation: "Many of the words and expressions here listed are not so much bad English as bad style, the commonplaces of careless writing. As illustrated under Feature, the proper correction is likely to be not the replacement of one word or set of words by another, but the replacement of vague generality by definite statement."

What justification do they give for what they consider 'bad style' or 'careless writing'?

I do wish they could have followed their own recommendations, especially as concerns the last clause, for this is nothing but vague generality, and a mistaken one at that.

Im going to resist the urge to copy/past Molly Blooms soliloquy here but for those who like particularly long sentences its quite the read.

https://archive.org/stream/MollyBloomMonologEnd/MollyBloomMo...

Nothing wrong with long sentences. In fact I am not a fan of Hemingway whose sentences are typically short.

I particularly like them in German, though they are uncommon on the web.

I think I demonstrate a bias: I tried to make my sentences in this comment hemingwayesque, but it appears I failed...yet they are, for my typical writing, brief!

Ah, yes. Nothing like Hegel, with one half of the separable verb on page n near the top, and the other half near the bottom of page n + 2.

Said the tedious German lecturer to the couple who stood up to go after twenty minutes: “Don't leave yet, I’m just getting to the verb!”

How can an essay like this not mention David Foster Wallace? So many of the sentences in Infinite Jest were absolute doozies.

> How can an essay like this not mention David Foster Wallace? So many of the sentences in Infinite Jest were absolute doozies.

How about Proust, 80 years earlier? Each of his half-page sentences are stand-alone pieces of art.

Nor Bernhard?

It's funny that in the 19th century sentences got so long that sometimes the writer would remind the reader of what was still in the air, by repeating it with "--I say, ". (I tried to look for an example but didn't find one straight away, sorry.)

T. R. Pearson's books such as "The Last of How it Was" have wonderfully long, rambling sentences that remind me of how some people in the southern US I've known speak.

it's attested that "show, don't tell" was created to reduce exposition, which CIA operatives had noticed were the places left-wing writers would put in their left-wing ideas.

https://twitter.com/eugen_levine/status/834865006705512449?l...

Rather ironic that this post or short essay is completely written in 8 - 10 words sentences. The full stop comes way too often, making the text a constant stop-and-go, like a car stuck in traffic. Is it because of a certain unwillingness to talk that the author mutters each sentence between his teeth? Or is it for assertiveness- each full stop making a statement, as axioms and lemmas of a theorem to prove?

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