8 ms·

In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

80 points by JamesClear99 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jdeisenberg 8y ago
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.”
wrycoder 8y ago
“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.
clairity 8y ago
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.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  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 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15509
  - ams6110 8y ago
    > 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.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      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'.
      - watwut 8y ago
        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.
        _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
munchbunny 8y ago
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.
didgeoridoo 8y ago
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
- duncan-donuts 8y ago
  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!
  - kwhitefoot 8y ago
    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 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 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.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  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.
winchling 8y ago
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
karaokeyoga 8y ago
“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
lucas_membrane 8y ago
“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
logicallee 8y ago
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.)
curuinor 8y ago
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?lang=en https://twitter.com/eugen_levine/status/834865006705512449?l...
celias 8y ago
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.
mirimir 8y ago
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.
- rangibaby 8y ago
  Your sentences should be as long or short as they need to be to communicate clearly
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Exactly so.
    - jacobush 8y ago
      This.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        Yep.
        mirimir 8y ago
        Da
      - mercer 8y ago
        I reflexively downvote "This.". This time I didn't.
- newsbinator 8y ago
  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.
chrismorgan 8y ago
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.
- mirimir 8y ago
  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 ;)
rudolfwinestock 8y ago
How can an essay like this not mention David Foster Wallace? So many of the sentences in Infinite Jest were absolute doozies.
- speedplane 8y ago
  > 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.
- edflsafoiewq 8y ago
  Nor Bernhard?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gumby 8y ago
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!
- cafard 8y ago
  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.
  - wrycoder 8y ago
    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!”
speedplane 8y ago
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.
- coliveira 8y ago
  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.
ian0 8y ago
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/MollyBloomMonologhyEnd_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/MollyBloomMonologEnd/MollyBloomMo...
artificialLimbs 8y ago
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.
coliveira 8y ago
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.
Udik 8y ago
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?
samizdatum 8y ago
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."

80 points by JamesClear99 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

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.”

wrycoder 8y ago

“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.

clairity 8y ago

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.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
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 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15509
- ams6110 8y ago
  > 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.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    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'.
    - watwut 8y ago
      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.
      - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago

munchbunny 8y ago

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.

didgeoridoo 8y ago

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

duncan-donuts 8y ago
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!
- kwhitefoot 8y ago
  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 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 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.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
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.

winchling 8y ago

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

karaokeyoga 8y ago

“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

lucas_membrane 8y ago

“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

logicallee 8y ago

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.)

curuinor 8y ago

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?lang=en https://twitter.com/eugen_levine/status/834865006705512449?l...

celias 8y ago

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.

mirimir 8y ago

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.

rangibaby 8y ago
Your sentences should be as long or short as they need to be to communicate clearly
- mirimir 8y ago
  Exactly so.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    This.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      Yep.
      - mirimir 8y ago
        Da
    - mercer 8y ago
      I reflexively downvote "This.". This time I didn't.
newsbinator 8y ago
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.

chrismorgan 8y ago

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.

mirimir 8y ago
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 ;)

rudolfwinestock 8y ago

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

speedplane 8y ago
> 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.
edflsafoiewq 8y ago
Nor Bernhard?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

gumby 8y ago

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!

cafard 8y ago
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.
- wrycoder 8y ago
  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!”

speedplane 8y ago

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.

coliveira 8y ago
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.

ian0 8y ago

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

artificialLimbs 8y ago

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.

coliveira 8y ago

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.

Udik 8y ago

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?

samizdatum 8y ago

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."