The Long and Short of Literary Sentences

Long Sentences

When you write, remember that long sentences ask your reader to work a little harder. The end of a sentence gives a reader a tiny moment of rest, a chance to prepare for your next thought. When you ask a reader to follow a long sentence, therefore, you can offer them something else in place of that rest: the satisfactions of thoughtfully complex sentence construction. Sloppy long sentences exhaust your reader. Elegant long sentences invite the reader to share the pleasures of your best thinking.

James Baldwin writes sentences that offer those pleasures in abundance. Some of his striking sentences, for example, use the technique of chiasmus. Chiasmus is named for the Greek letter chi, which looks like the X of the English alphabet. That symbol indicates the crossing over of chiasmus, which involves writing two things (A and B), then reversing them to form an ABBA pattern. Baldwin writes, “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” The first half of the sentence describes a relationship between people and history, and the second half reverses the relationship. Reading the sentence, you can feel the care of its construction, the way that Baldwin invites you to share in the precision of this thinking. He also writes, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Chiasmus again! Most writers would not choose to use the passive voice four straight times (is faced, be changed, be changed, is faced), but in this case, Baldwin uses that repetition to create a tight ABBA chiasmus. The sentence gets longer, but Baldwin maintains control.

That kind of control creates a somewhat looser feel in some of Baldwin’s other sentences, such as this one: “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.” I love this sentence! It talks about sensuality—the pleasures of the senses—in a way that allows the reader to experience those pleasures. Most obviously, the sentence lands on the image of “bread,” a word well calculated to evoke taste, smell, and even touch through the idea of “the making of bread.” The sentence also creates sonic pleasure. It opens with hesitations: the interruptions of “I think” and “of life itself” indicate the writer’s voice working through its process before settling into the smoother rhythms of the end. The final segment, “from the effort of loving to the making of bread,” shifts into an even higher gear by putting at least two unstressed syllables between every stressed syllable: “from the EFFort of LOVing to the MAKing of BREAD.” Extra stresses slow prose down; unstressed syllables speed it up. Here, Baldwin moves from the hesitations of the beginning of the sentence to controlled, fast flight at the end. The sounds of the words create their own kind of sensuality.

OK, you say, Baldwin’s sentence is pretty long (37 words). But you want to see a true giant of a sentence! Check out this one, from Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

The sentence contains a daunting 98 words, but Whitman offers the reader handles to hang onto the meaning. Most importantly, he uses anaphora, the technique of repeating a phrase, especially at the beginning of lines: the first four lines begin “Others will,” and then the parallel between “Fifty years hence” and “A hundred years hence” anchors the second section. Whitman also reinforces his structure with punctuation. The first five lines could all end with semicolons or periods (because they are independent clauses), but Whitman uses only commas until the sentence hits its key turning point at the end of the fourth line, before “Fifty years hence” shifts the to the vision of the future. Those commas maintain the momentum of the language, making it resemble the “flood-tide” of the first part of the section, and the language of the end falls away, with the word “ebb-tide” itself ebbing gently into the silence of the sentence’s end. This is a magnificent sentence.

Short Sentences

One of the best-known short sentences in English literature comes from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: “Reader, I married him.” Four words! Brontë calls our attention to the sentence, placing it at the beginning of a chapter and, of course, using it to solidify a major plot point in the book. The phrasing also reinforces important elements of the novel’s narration in the voice of the title character: the direct connection to the reader, the active and lively character of Jane. (Consider the difference in the alternative, passive construction of the same sentence: “Reader, we were married.”)

CATPAW’s visualization tool can help us see how Brontë also uses the lengths of the surrounding sentences to emphasize the importance of “Reader, I married him.” In this visualization, I have removed the chapter heading so that we see the longer sentences funneling down to the lighting strike of “Reader, I married him,” then getting longer to return to the narrator’s usual style:

He put me off his knee, rose, and reverently lifting his hat from his brow, and bending his sightless eyes to the earth, he stood in mute devotion. (28) Only the last words of the worship were audible. (9) “I thank my Maker, that, in the midst of judgment, he has remembered mercy. (14) I humbly entreat my Redeemer to give me strength to lead henceforth a purer life than I have done hitherto!” Then he stretched his hand out to be led. (29) I took that dear hand, held it a moment to my lips, then let it pass round my shoulder: being so much lower of stature than he, I served both for his prop and guide. (35) We entered the wood, and wended homeward. (7)

Reader, I married him. (4) A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present. (15) When we got back from church, I went into the kitchen of the manor-house, where Mary was cooking the dinner and John cleaning the knives, and I said— “Mary, I have been married to Mr. Rochester this morning. (38) ” The housekeeper and her husband were both of that decent phlegmatic order of people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having one’s ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation, and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment. (51) Mary did look up, and she did stare at me: the ladle with which she was basting a pair of chickens roasting at the fire, did for some three minutes hang suspended in air; and for the same space of time John’s knives also had rest from the polishing process: but Mary, bending again over the roast, said only— “Have you, Miss?" (62)

You can see how Brontë creates the force of “Reader, I married him” by bringing our attention slowly to the sharp point of a short sentence, then shifting back to longer ones.

As you see Whitman's and Brontë's longer sentences, you may be reminded of things you've learned or heard about "run-on sentences," a concept that often leads people to think of long sentences as generally incorrect or bad. You've seen that I don't talk about long sentences that way. Let's take up the issue directly by exploring run-on sentences and comma splices.