The great shift of English prose
worksinprogress.news
worksinprogress.news
I see this much less in modern novels and articles. Where is the flavor from pausing. all. the. time?
Perhaps it is also due to a widening of the audience that can provide literary criticism back to the author. Only the educated wealthy individuals with connections could offer critiques in the Victorian era of fiction; now it is anyone with a social media account. Judging by the failure of widespread peer review in "hype" research fields, I'm not sure this is a good thing.
(as a sidenote, trying to make a point about grammar made me very self-conscious about mine, this is why I had to read a good book!)
I learned in high school lit that sentence length is an artistic choice as meaningful as word selection: long sentences can reflect stream of consciousness, recursive thought, associative or digressive exploration. Short sentences can reflect anxiety, urgency, vigilance, cognitive compression.
There are a lot of factors that have led to the decay of long sentences. Scientific writing norms, ubiquitous style guides like Strunk & White, modern distraction/multitasking/short(er)-form content, and my favorite, impoverished education - and the concomitant lack of trust in the reader on the part of the author.
The irony of this post having an initial sentence consisting of one word is either a sublime statement regarding the topic at hand or an unintentional affirmation of the subsequent factors enumerated.
Thanks for the new word! Native speaker but I’ve never seen/heard that one before. Might be more common in a commonwealth country though tbf.
I think the preference for short sentences in today's prose is a lot like vocal fry among North American women: a deliberate attempt to sound young.
It just feels more artificial and self-indulgent in English. As if the author wants to show off how well they can string together longer sentences, and it's up to you, the reader, to keep up with the magnanimousness of the author allowing their readers to glimpse upon their greatness.
Chinese novels are on the other side of the spectrum. The sentences simply can't be very long and but often don't have any connecting words between sentences. The readers have to infer.
There is no grammatical ceiling on sentence length in Sinitic languages, Chinese languages (all of them) can form long sentences, and they all do possess a great many connecting words. Computational work on Chinese explicitly talks about «long Chinese sentences» and how to parse them[0].
However, many Chinese varieties and writing styles often rely more on parataxis[1] than English does, so relations between clauses are more often (but not always) conveyed by meaning, word order, aspect, punctuation, and discourse context, rather than by obligatory overt conjunctions. That is a tendency, not an inability.
But it feels unnatural. So most Chinese sentences are fairly short as a result. And it's also why commas, stops, and even spacing between words are a fairly recent invention. They are simply not needed when the text is formed of implicitly connected statements that don't need to be deeply nested.
To give an example, here's our favorite long-winded Ishmael: "Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains." The Chinese translation is: "是的，这里坐着的是一群老水手，其中有很多人，在怒海中会毫不畏怯地登到巨鲸的背上——那可是他们一无所知的东西啊——眼都不眨地把鲸鱼斗死；然而，这时他们一起坐在公共的早餐桌上——同样的职业，同样的癖好——他们却互相羞怯地打量着对方，仿佛是绿山山从未出过羊圈的绵羊"
Or word-for-word: "Yes, here sitting [people] are the group of old sailors, among them there are many people, [who] in the middle of the raging sea can/will without fear on the whale's back climb. That whales were something they knew nothing about".
The subordinate clauses become almost stand-alone statements, and it's up to the reader to connect them.
Strictly speaking, complex nested clauses are slowly on the way out of English as well due to the analytical nature of its present form, which is what the cited article partially laments, and remain a distinctive feature of highly inflected languages (German, Scandinavian, Slavic, etc.).
C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin’s translation of Marcel Proust’s «In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)» contains nearly half-page long sentences.
Many modern readers complain about the substantial difficulty in following such sentences, although I personally find them delightful.
> ] The girl threw the ball. Then she went inside. Her mother sounded irritated.
> Is the second so much easier to read?
The second one is semantically different. In the first sentence, it is pervasive information, from an omnipresent narrator who can peer into the minds of characters, that the mother is irritated.
In the second sequence, the mother sounds irritated: the narrative voice doesn't look inside the mind, but only reports on the external evidence.
In the first sentence, the girl doesn't just go inside; we know that she runs. She also runs to her mother. In the second sequence, she goes inside, not necessarily to her mother.
There is a sense in the first sentence that the girl might know that her mother is irritated before running inside.
There is a sense in the second sequence that the girl learns, together with the reader, that her mother is irritated, only after going inside.
no, only that she sounds irritated, we have to assume there was information we were not party to that the girl was.
[1] https://nautil.us/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-english-sentence-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15720892 (2017, 84 points, 39 comments)
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695580 (2025, 100 points, 52 comments)
I did enjoy reading this, but "right branching" / "left branching" aside, this is still more soft cultural commentary than hard linguistics. Even on that level, what seemed glaringly missing was more prose/poetry distinction --- did writing change overall? is prose a new category? or did the boundary between prose and poetry shift? (e.g. maybe before rhyme distinguished poetry, and rhythm was every, and then later rhythm distinguished poetry and rhyme was optional. I'm just guessing.) "Speechified" is a funny term when poetry traditionally was meant to spoken. (Maybe a good left-coded cultural reference to balance all the right-coded ones would be the e're-helpful reminder that spoken, non-melodic poetry thus remains very much part of our vernacular culture.)
Also, if you want to make a JKV vs Coverdale distinction, please don't also skip between psalms and regular story-telling passages. Those are in a very different style regardless of translator! Better to show different translations of the same passage to prove the point, but of course that would not work so well.
For example, yes for most of the couple psalms I glanced at, Coverdale is definitely better poetry than King James, but for the most famous Psalm 23 https://biblehub.com/coverdale/psalms/23.htm https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2023&vers..., KJV blows Coverdale out of the water.
My kingdom for a linguist credentialed enough to write in, say, Quanta Magazine, with an art/literature passion on the side, to write on this topic with more precision and proof.
Instead we get an example from the Bible (Psalms 100:4), displaying characteristic parallelism but still with perfectly modern sentence structure: "Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name."
And then we get a new section heading, "Modern English emerges with bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," quoting an identically constructed sentence from the same Bible (Acts 4:8–9): "Ye rulers of the people, and elders of Israel, [consider] the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole," etc.
If there's any distinction to be made there, surely it's that the former quotation is from Hebrew and the latter from Greek — but then isn't it rather a little surprising that the exact same rhetorical device, this specific type of parallelism, should be used, than that there should be anything different about the structure of these two verses? But then — guess what — there's nothing different about their structure at all!
So what's the deal with that whole section (or pair of sections), and what actually is the author's thesis? What is the "great shift" mentioned in the headline?
If the thesis is that there was some big shift in sentence structure circa 1600, I'd say it's just demonstrably wrong. Look for example at Chaucer, circa 1400: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/tale-melibee-0 Nothing unusual about those sentences, is there?
Doesn't mention Thomas Mann, or Proust. Two exemplars of people who felt the comma and semicolon justified parenthetical statements which run to the page count length, not the word count length, in coruscating piles. I think Proust was having a lend of us, it's "tristram shandy" shaggy dog stories brought into the modern era by an aesthete. I think Thomas Mann just didn't know how to stop.
The people writing books are generally professional longform writers with professional editors. That's a different population than your officemates, Twitter, or even journalists (who are professional writers, of a different sort).
However, none of those examples are actually ambiguous. I'm pretty sure that those examples translated word for word into any language would also be understandable.
The third one is technically incorrect because of subject-verb number disagreement -- but ignoring that is common in some vernaculars
The problem is, that when you try to reduce an example of "bad" english to the bare bones (for clarity), you often end up with quite legitimate language.
Even in Latin the occasional transgression is sort of allowed: "Alea iacta est" - that is of course "idium". I studied Latin via "Civis Romanus", "mental" and "idiot" (Mentor and Idium).
An englander would of course say something far more erudite, than a course roman general, such as: "Fucking 'ave it, you twats".
eat man lion. lion man eat. man eat lion. eat lion man.
Who is eating who? When formed according to English grammar it doesn't leave any ambiguity even if the phrase is improbable: "The biscuit has eaten the girl."
Linguistic topology is the study of patterns in languages according to structure. It's a niche topic which is unfortunate because certain patterns hint at something about the structure of human thought.
Such as with word order. Verb in the middle or at the start or at the end? Subject before verb or after verb? Object before verb or after verb? Every permutation does exist in some language.
But object before subject and verb is extremely rare. And in the few languages which do it that way they do not do consistently with it often only occurring in certain moods or certain conditions of syntactic alignment.
To the mind not natural Yoda's speech is.
I don't think there is anything wrong with allowing a small amount of "world knowledge" to guide language parsing - the world caused language to "be" not the other way around.
Anyway whenever, outside of smoking crack, did a girl get eaten by a biscuit? Never, so that phase is unambiguous.
Object before subject: I'll grant you that - its a probable sign of madness or a green puppet.
Me, really? You screamed!
My first grade teacher told me never start a sentence with but or and.
In this case, the second sentence could equally have been written as just another clause
> My first grade teacher told me never start a sentence with but or and.
One of my elementary school teachers also taught me to use past participles, which means the quote from the article should have been written thusly:
Lots of English writing has gotten simpler through ...
Yes
> What do you think of that advice today?
It is a small part of my English enunciation.
> How might it vary depending on where in the anglophone world you live, and your age?
Significantly.
But I did not author a critique regarding English prose and the nature of prevalent sentence structures therein.
Had the author declared what English dialect they were using and/or critiquing, and were it British English as well, then this is a salient point indeed.
>So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelias was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through 'and' as it opens,—there—there—we're here!...in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech...ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.
William Gass - On Being Blue.