I see this much less in modern novels and articles. Where is the flavor from pausing. all. the. time?
I see this much less in modern novels and articles. Where is the flavor from pausing. all. the. time?
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.
(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!)
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.
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.).
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.
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.