The Secrets of a Sentence
There’s a story about George Washington Carver. He asked God to reveal the secrets of the universe, and God was silent. He asked God to reveal the secrets of science and biology, and God was silent. Then he asked God to reveal the secrets of the peanut, and God did.
I don’t care about peanuts. But you could say I’ve spent the last ten years asking God to help me understand the secrets of a sentence. And I’ve worked hard to show God that I’m serious about the question.
Along the way, I’ve learned some tricks about how sentences work, and I thought I would share those in a regular series called simply “Sentence Tips.” (I’ll post this series even more often on my regular blog, GoodWordEditing.com.)
Let’s start with the easiest tricks I know—the effect of sentence length. Here it is in a nut shell. Are you ready?
Short sentences move quickly.
I’m talking about pacing here. In creative writing workshops, I remember the deadliest comment of all. “Your pacing seems off.” That’s workshop code for “the story was slow.” And everyone knows slow writing = boring writing. At least, slow writing is often boring.
Enough abstraction. Take a look at a master in action. This passage comes from a chapter called “How To Tell a True War Story” in The Things They Carried. The master is Tim O’Brien. In this passage, an American soldier in
Vietnam is describing the actions of a platoon that has become spooked in the jungle.
The guys can’t cope. They lose it. They get on the radio and report enemy movement—a whole army, they say—and they order up the firepower. They get arty and gunships. They call in air strikes. And I’ll tell you . . . all night long, they just smoke those mountains. They make jungle juice. They blow away trees and glee clubs and whatever else there is to blow away. Scorch time. They walk napalm up and down the ridges. They bring in the Cobras and F-4s, they use Willie Petter and HE and incendiaries. It’s all fire. They make those mountains burn.
Those are some short sentences. And, man, they move. You can see how the choppy thoughts also do a good job of imitating human speech—even though in reality people ramble on and on and on when they talk without ever even working toward something like a conclusion or a period or a moment to pause and breathe and give their listeners a chance to get a word in edgewise. Or maybe that’s just me.
Speaking of long sentences, there’s another master we should look at. Jane Austen is one of my favorite authors–just read the opening of Pride and Prejudice:
“IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
“However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
“ ‘My dear Mr. Bennet,’’ said his lady to him one day, ‘have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?’
“Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.”
Long sentences tend to feel more dense to the reader. This seems so obvious, but a lot of writers don’t understand it. They enjoy weaving elaborate sentences with multiple subordinate clauses and phrases and elaborate parallelism. All of these elements are wonderful tools, but they slow the reader down. Just be careful and judicious.
Trust your content rather than your style. Readers will gladly slow down for a passage as beautiful as Austen’s. Those who enjoy meditative texts will love savory the poetry of her sentences. But how many of us can actually write something so witty and poetic? Even more importantly, how many of us can sustain such beautiful prose for long periods? And even if you are such a writer, you must come to grips with the fact that most readers are looking for escape not beauty.
Fiction allows readers to look through the window to another world. They want prose that is a transparent portal through which they look.
Nonfiction allows readers to find practical advice that will help them escape the problems in their actual lives. They want prose that sounds like their buddy but works like a good set of instructions.
Here’s the point. Don’t write a lot of meditative sentences and then get frustrated when you can’t garner a large audience. Not that large audiences should be your goal. But if you want to reach large audiences, you have to write for them.
The masses don’t meditate much. They’ll suffer through a good dense sentence every few pages, but if you try to write Moby Dick for the 21st century, you can expect to sell as well as Moby Dick did. (It was a complete disaster that can be said to have ruined Melville’s career.)
Of course, there are all kinds of long sentences. Next month, I will discuss some of the different ways to construct a long sentence and the different rhetorical effects you can expect the text to achieve.
Feb 2007
