Ink Tea Stone Leaf

The other day at work, as I was assisting a small group of high school students in collectively and collaboratively editing a writing assignment by making changes to a shared Google document that was purposefully riddled with grammar and syntax errors, the teacher advised them to identify and correct a particularly egregious run-on sentence, and reminded them of the importance of clarity and conciseness in formal writing (particularly in an academic context), which caused me to consider my own opinions as a writer as to the merits of very long sentences and complicated sentence structures from both a practical and aesthetic point of view, considering both the evolving ideas and practices of learned professionals and amateur writers of English over the centuries and the inherently subjective and imprecise nature of determining when a sentence has gone on too long (and what should properly be done about it); and which furthermore caused me to wish that some curious and interested student would ask me to share my thoughts on the subject, although I knew that this was unlikely and that if I wanted my thoughts on so-called “run-on sentences” to be known, then I had better write up a blog post about it and demonstrate my ideas in an organized if somewhat tortuous fashion for the benefit of anybody who appreciates a bit of gentle push-back against the received wisdom.

I’ll tell you right now, the best thing about writing that last sentence was thinking of all of the ways I could augment it with clauses without causing it to collapse to the floor and explode into a million pieces. Well, two hundred and twenty nine or so pieces, if we don’t want to exaggerate. I know you can count and I believe you can divide, but the average number of words in these last few sentences (including this sentence) was thirty, so that one was kind of a doozy.

I can write short sentences too. See? I have layers. I even have hidden complexities.

I’ll be honest with you, though: I appreciate a very long sentence, and it’s unfortunate that so many people think the problem with a run-on sentence is that it’s very long.  Just how long is too long for a sentence? The introductory sentence of this post almost certainly qualifies as “too long,” but I’ve read (and written) worse sentences that were much shorter.

A complete sentence consists of a subject and a predicate. This is the line that is given in teaching children how to speak and write, in order that they should not get too comfortable dispensing fragments that are difficult to understand. What we have to admit, though, is that a complete sentence does not have to literally consist of a a spoken (or written) subject plus a spoken (or written) predicate. This is particularly clear in the case of answers to simple questions. “What is Julie doing?” can be acceptably answered by the utterance of “running,” just as “who is running?” can be acceptably answered by “Julie.” “Yes” is also a complete sentence, if it is implicitly understood by its audience to stand for “yes (she is running).”

We also have to admit that a sentence can contain many subjects, and that a “predicate” can be a great, expansive, even sprawling thing. Perhaps Julie was not merely running, but running haphazardly through a dangerous and comically elaborate course of Rube Goldberg-esque traps and contraptions hidden in the Okefenokee swamp as the FBI pursued her with a warrant for drunk and disorderly conduct at a high school theater club’s performance of the Lion King, clutching a lock of Simba’s mane all the while. We have conjunctions and prepositions, clauses and tags, parentheticals and semi-colons and all manner of punctuation for the extension of brief simplicities into such wonderful and bizarre complexities, which necessarily take up a fair amount of real estate on the page. I believe we are called to use them, with delight as well as responsibility.

The case for being brief is mostly practical: short sentences are easy to understand. It is usually not difficult to take a short sentence and identify the subject and predicate. Although conveying meaning with precision may require the use of one or more coordinating clauses, reducing the number of words by as much as possible correspondingly reduces the cognitive load on the reader. For inexperienced and unskilled writers, it also reduces the chance of making serious and confusing grammatical errors that will render meaning even more difficult to discern.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, however, a stubborn commitment to shortening every sentence as much as possible is drearily monotonous. A long sentence, even a very long one, that gracefully bears additions and subtle alterations in its trajectory, while maintaining its fundamental stability and never forgetting what its subject is and what that subject is up to, is a delight to read. Such a sentence is like an intricately articulated sculpture that nevertheless exhibits overall balance and symmetry. If a sentence is going to fly, it first needs to get a running start.

Every sentence within a larger piece is like a living organism within its ecosystem, requiring all of the adaptations necessary to fit its niche; that is, its function as to the purpose of the writing. As the intention behind the first sentence of this post was to demonstrate how absurdly long a sentence could be, it could only improve as more words and clauses were added in as many places as they could grammatically fit. Most sentences cannot be improved this way. Indeed, I rarely find when editing myself (and I do edit myself, believe what you will) that whether I am adding or subtracting words, it is the length of the sentence that is of most concern. What matters is that the sentence has all of the right tools to survive in the environment where I have placed it.

This is probably not great advice for the student who struggles to write with fluency, and has no concrete understanding of what I refer to with all this metaphorical talk of niches. I’ll try to give some better advice now: a sentence is a unit of meaning, and a writer succeeds by organizing what they mean into units of the appropriate size. You don’t measure a lake with teaspoons, or a pencil with miles. A good writer has an intuitive sense of the right number of words for a sentence, or the right number of sentences for a paragraph, and so on up the chain. Good writers also have different styles and don’t necessarily come to the same conclusions on these points, but if they write with intention, then their intentions are clear. The key to writing does not lie in hitting arbitrary benchmarks, but in keeping meaning under control while stimulating the reader with variety and color. This is not a matter of counting beans, but rather of cultivating a sense of taste (for beans?), which can only be accomplished through large amounts of reading and writing, through which the writer acquires a comfortable facility for the modes of verbal self-expression (though not necessarily for beans).

If you have written a sentence that pulses with rhythm and sparkles with clarity, don’t second guess yourself because it takes up more than one or two lines, or diverts slightly from the straightest line from A to B to enjoy a few dance steps along the way. And if you want to write a meandering, complicated sentence that is longer than any reasonable sentence should be simply because it makes you smile, well, isn’t it a wonderful thing to smile about?