A few writers, particularly those who work for online editions of different newspapers, prefer longer to shorter sentences and periodic to sloppier ones. They inspire greenhorns to use untidy conjunctions, dusky prepositions, silly dashes, weak commas and confusing conjunctive pronouns, besides long quotations. They forget full stops are sturdier than commas and semicolons.
They justify their points citing a few newspaper articles from the Internet, and call those using short, pesky and communicative sentences conservatives. Maybe, such writers want to take us back to the Elizabethan era or to the Victorian era when one sentence used to run at least one or two pages or sometimes three pages.
Surely, this cannot be the language of the digital world. Rather, it should be peskier than the one used by the print journalism.
Nevertheless, proper prepositions, connectives, commas, dashes and semicolon should be judiciously used, but a sentence should not go beyond 30 words. Simple, short, correct and clear sentences leave a permanent imprint on the mind of readers.
The Economist, The Guardian, the BBC, The Daily Telegraph and The Times, The Sunday Times follow this style.
Still, long sentences are sometimes required, but writing such sentences should not be the habit. The writers who prefer jumbled to clear sentences should at least read the introductions of “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Moby Dick,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “The End of the Affair,” “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and “The Stranger.”
All these works consist of an elegant style that is easy to understand. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife –Jean Austin, Pride and Prejudice. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Writing with Style, Lane Greene says, “The key is conclusion.
Short sentences are crucial to memorable writing, for the simple reason that memory is limited. This is true for working memory, the kind that stores material temporarily. Remembering a ten-digit phone number is far harder than remembering a six-digit one.”
Therefore, tricky grammar in a long sentence comprising more than 50 words imposes an extra burden on a reader’s memory. Do you eat a plate of rice, a bowl of cooked lentil, a few chapattis, a bowl of curry, a piece of sweetmeat, a bit of pickle, a piece of ice-cream and some curd at one go?
Or you give a gap between taking in one item and another. This is how complex sentences feel to readers who are already working to the utmost to buy your arguments in favour of long sentences. But there is a solution to get out of the boredom of long sentences – the full stop – the writer’s best friend.
This modest dot has two fine effects: it reduces the risk of getting tangled in syntax and keeps you away from confusing readers. A few know that many grammatical errors creep into long sentences. The parts of speech do not logically stand with each other.
So, a short sentence is simple and more correct. Earnest Hemingway mastered the art of writing simple sentences. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish –Old Man and the Sea. This sentence may shock the mavens pleading for long sentences.
Lane Greene’s Writing with Style says, “Mark Twain, like George Orwell, was a great stylist. About another writer he said that he “hadn’t any more invention than a horse; and I don’t mean high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes-horse.” Twain’s rules echo those of Orwell.
Twain said that a writer should: Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it. Use the right word, not his second cousin Not omit necessary details. Avoid slovenliness of form. Use good grammar. Employ a simple and straight forward style.
