I also see the shrinking sentence length celebrated among my scientific colleagues who abhor the dreaded "run-on sentence". Maybe it is because I have no formal literacy or linguistic training but I mourn this loss; older, classical novels used to have a tremendous flavor in their sentence structure by prioritizing the longform. Some English translations of Russian literature can run into the absurd (sentences at half a page long), but even then there is a beauty to it.
I see this much less in modern novels and articles. Where is the flavor from pausing. all. the. time?
Yes. A long sentence can be thought of as a room, not a hallway.
I learned in high school lit that sentence length is an artistic choice as meaningful as word selection: long sentences can reflect stream of consciousness, recursive thought, associative or digressive exploration. Short sentences can reflect anxiety, urgency, vigilance, cognitive compression.
There are a lot of factors that have led to the decay of long sentences. Scientific writing norms, ubiquitous style guides like Strunk & White, modern distraction/multitasking/short(er)-form content, and my favorite, impoverished education - and the concomitant lack of trust in the reader on the part of the author.
I recently read "The Sense Of Style", which explained the actual principle behind making an understandable run-on. The trick was to allow the brain to mentally store away the earlier parts of the sentence, and take it out of the parsing context into the logical connections context. Not going to try and remake the point from scratch, if you're curious go read the book!
(as a sidenote, trying to make a point about grammar made me very self-conscious about mine, this is why I had to read a good book!)
The vogue for artificially-short sentences removes not just shape and color, but also logical relationships. Writers and readers are unburdened of tracing chains of cause-and-effect or the dreaded wondering "why". It's part of the larger societal craving to shrug off reality and one's place in it.
Russian is much more conducive to long sentences because it's highly inflected. Adjectives have to agree with the nouns, and verbs can carry the grammatical gender and person markers. This all helps to keep the context clearer, the reader doesn't have to strain their brain to connect the clauses. So long-winded descriptions fit really well into the flow of the text.
It just feels more artificial and self-indulgent in English. As if the author wants to show off how well they can string together longer sentences, and it's up to you, the reader, to keep up with the magnanimousness of the author allowing their readers to glimpse upon their greatness.
Chinese novels are on the other side of the spectrum. The sentences simply can't be very long and but often don't have any connecting words between sentences. The readers have to infer.
When I was a kid, I learned a run-on sentence was a sentence without adequate conjunctions or punctuations to mark and separate the clauses. E.g.: "My wife and I went to a concert we saw The Cure they were terrific." I still have a tendency to write long sentences, but sometimes when I go overboard (e.g., a whole paragraph turns out to be one long sentence) I might break it in two, for clarity. But I don't go to grug-speak extremes.
I think the preference for short sentences in today's prose is a lot like vocal fry among North American women: a deliberate attempt to sound young.
> Some English translations of Russian literature can run into the absurd (sentences at half a page long), but even then there is a beauty to it.
C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin’s translation of Marcel Proust’s «In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)» contains nearly half-page long sentences.
Many modern readers complain about the substantial difficulty in following such sentences, although I personally find them delightful.
I started reading melancholy of resistance after the author won the Nobel prize this year. The sentences are very long, the book is really difficult to read imo though.
> ] Before running inside to her irritated mother, the girl threw the ball.
> ] The girl threw the ball. Then she went inside. Her mother sounded irritated.
> Is the second so much easier to read?
The second one is semantically different. In the first sentence, it is pervasive information, from an omnipresent narrator who can peer into the minds of characters, that the mother is irritated.
In the second sequence, the mother sounds irritated: the narrative voice doesn't look inside the mind, but only reports on the external evidence.
In the first sentence, the girl doesn't just go inside; we know that she runs. She also runs to her mother. In the second sequence, she goes inside, not necessarily to her mother.
There is a sense in the first sentence that the girl might know that her mother is irritated before running inside.
There is a sense in the second sequence that the girl learns, together with the reader, that her mother is irritated, only after going inside.
I love the English language. It's so simple yet versatile, and has gone through a fascinating series of changes. The "great vovel shift" was one I encountered while searching for rhymes that only make sense when read off paper, but not when pronounced:
Mercatus Center...Free Press...dropping Scott Alexander amid early modern English bible translations...I get the sense that some nostalgic conservative donors want to bankroll the second coming of William Safire, with just the smallest of updates to hat-tip the modern tech right.
I did enjoy reading this, but "right branching" / "left branching" aside, this is still more soft cultural commentary than hard linguistics. Even on that level, what seemed glaringly missing was more prose/poetry distinction --- did writing change overall? is prose a new category? or did the boundary between prose and poetry shift? (e.g. maybe before rhyme distinguished poetry, and rhythm was every, and then later rhythm distinguished poetry and rhyme was optional. I'm just guessing.) "Speechified" is a funny term when poetry traditionally was meant to spoken. (Maybe a good left-coded cultural reference to balance all the right-coded ones would be the e're-helpful reminder that spoken, non-melodic poetry thus remains very much part of our vernacular culture.)
Also, if you want to make a JKV vs Coverdale distinction, please don't also skip between psalms and regular story-telling passages. Those are in a very different style regardless of translator! Better to show different translations of the same passage to prove the point, but of course that would not work so well.
My kingdom for a linguist credentialed enough to write in, say, Quanta Magazine, with an art/literature passion on the side, to write on this topic with more precision and proof.
I'm not sure I follow the section titled "From periods to sentences." One of the topic sentences in that section is "Aristotle preferred periodic diction"; but I don't see any examples from Aristotle.
Instead we get an example from the Bible (Psalms 100:4), displaying characteristic parallelism but still with perfectly modern sentence structure: "Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name."
And then we get a new section heading, "Modern English emerges with bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," quoting an identically constructed sentence from the same Bible (Acts 4:8–9): "Ye rulers of the people, and elders of Israel, [consider] the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole," etc.
If there's any distinction to be made there, surely it's that the former quotation is from Hebrew and the latter from Greek — but then isn't it rather a little surprising that the exact same rhetorical device, this specific type of parallelism, should be used, than that there should be anything different about the structure of these two verses? But then — guess what — there's nothing different about their structure at all!
So what's the deal with that whole section (or pair of sections), and what actually is the author's thesis? What is the "great shift" mentioned in the headline?
If the thesis is that there was some big shift in sentence structure circa 1600, I'd say it's just demonstrably wrong. Look for example at Chaucer, circa 1400: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/tale-melibee-0 Nothing unusual about those sentences, is there?
Mentions Hemingway, if you have watched "midnight in paris" you will get a feel for the popular didacticism implicit in his recommendations to style, baby shoes aside.
Doesn't mention Thomas Mann, or Proust. Two exemplars of people who felt the comma and semicolon justified parenthetical statements which run to the page count length, not the word count length, in coruscating piles. I think Proust was having a lend of us, it's "tristram shandy" shaggy dog stories brought into the modern era by an aesthete. I think Thomas Mann just didn't know how to stop.
I can't help wondering to what extent the length of sentences used by English speakers has been influenced by the limitations of the technology which they used and grew accustomed to in their formative years; indeed, with both text messages and Twitter enforcing succinctness -- at least originally, although now text messages can be aggregated and Twitter allows for much longer posts than the original 140 characters -- it became impossible to write a sentence even as straightforward as this one.
> Pick up an old book and the sentences roll on. Go to the office, read the paper, or scroll Twitter and they do not. So it is said. I would like to suggest that this account is incomplete.
The people writing books are generally professional longform writers with professional editors. That's a different population than your officemates, Twitter, or even journalists (who are professional writers, of a different sort).
"Man dog walk. Boy biscuit eat. Girl throw ball." are held up as examples of incorrect english, which is largely fair.
However, none of those examples are actually ambiguous. I'm pretty sure that those examples translated word for word into any language would also be understandable.
You're cheating with your world knowledge to guide the parsing.
eat man lion. lion man eat. man eat lion. eat lion man.
Who is eating who? When formed according to English grammar it doesn't leave any ambiguity even if the phrase is improbable: "The biscuit has eaten the girl."
Linguistic topology is the study of patterns in languages according to structure. It's a niche topic which is unfortunate because certain patterns hint at something about the structure of human thought.
Such as with word order. Verb in the middle or at the start or at the end? Subject before verb or after verb? Object before verb or after verb? Every permutation does exist in some language.
But object before subject and verb is extremely rare. And in the few languages which do it that way they do not do consistently with it often only occurring in certain moods or certain conditions of syntactic alignment.
"Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them."
My first grade teacher told me never start a sentence with but or and.
In this case, the second sentence could equally have been written as just another clause
Yea but your early grade teachers also teach you that you can’t take the square root of a negative number. That’s how good education is done. First you are taught the rules, then you are taught the few times when to break them, and then as a master hopefully you flow between the states. Forever being in the first state is just stunting your own education.
>> "Lots of English writing has got simpler through ..."
> My first grade teacher told me never start a sentence with but or and.
One of my elementary school teachers also taught me to use past participles, which means the quote from the article should have been written thusly:
Lots of English writing has gotten simpler through ...
It is amusing that an article dedicated to enumerating the degeneration of English prose uses simplistic sentence structure as well as malformed sentences, such as the above.
Hm, I'd be curious to know how it is better than any of the modern developed languages such as german, french, russian, chinese or japanese ( and many others ). I could see that english borrowed many words from other cultures but other languages borrow too on as needed basis.
What is the sense of analyzing sentences removed from semantics and pragmatics? I am sure there is some utility to it in linguistics but we see this outside of linguistics a great deal. Short sentences are very useful to writers like Hemingway who dumps everything they can into the subtext but this also means we don't get much information from the semantics, it is all in the pragmatics. So what does the syntax really tell us about what is being said? Very little when it comes to short sentences as far as I can tell, becomes more interesting with long sentences but there it is a guide helping you through the semantics.
>So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelias was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through 'and' as it opens,—there—there—we're here!...in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech...ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.
hodgehog11|1 month ago
I see this much less in modern novels and articles. Where is the flavor from pausing. all. the. time?
CGMthrowaway|1 month ago
I learned in high school lit that sentence length is an artistic choice as meaningful as word selection: long sentences can reflect stream of consciousness, recursive thought, associative or digressive exploration. Short sentences can reflect anxiety, urgency, vigilance, cognitive compression.
There are a lot of factors that have led to the decay of long sentences. Scientific writing norms, ubiquitous style guides like Strunk & White, modern distraction/multitasking/short(er)-form content, and my favorite, impoverished education - and the concomitant lack of trust in the reader on the part of the author.
bagatelle|1 month ago
(as a sidenote, trying to make a point about grammar made me very self-conscious about mine, this is why I had to read a good book!)
Exoristos|1 month ago
cyberax|1 month ago
It just feels more artificial and self-indulgent in English. As if the author wants to show off how well they can string together longer sentences, and it's up to you, the reader, to keep up with the magnanimousness of the author allowing their readers to glimpse upon their greatness.
Chinese novels are on the other side of the spectrum. The sentences simply can't be very long and but often don't have any connecting words between sentences. The readers have to infer.
bitwize|1 month ago
I think the preference for short sentences in today's prose is a lot like vocal fry among North American women: a deliberate attempt to sound young.
inkyoto|1 month ago
C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin’s translation of Marcel Proust’s «In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past)» contains nearly half-page long sentences.
Many modern readers complain about the substantial difficulty in following such sentences, although I personally find them delightful.
tayo42|1 month ago
kazinator|1 month ago
> ] The girl threw the ball. Then she went inside. Her mother sounded irritated.
> Is the second so much easier to read?
The second one is semantically different. In the first sentence, it is pervasive information, from an omnipresent narrator who can peer into the minds of characters, that the mother is irritated.
In the second sequence, the mother sounds irritated: the narrative voice doesn't look inside the mind, but only reports on the external evidence.
In the first sentence, the girl doesn't just go inside; we know that she runs. She also runs to her mother. In the second sequence, she goes inside, not necessarily to her mother.
There is a sense in the first sentence that the girl might know that her mother is irritated before running inside.
There is a sense in the second sequence that the girl learns, together with the reader, that her mother is irritated, only after going inside.
jpfromlondon|1 month ago
no, only that she sounds irritated, we have to assume there was information we were not party to that the girl was.
mananaysiempre|1 month ago
[1] https://nautil.us/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-english-sentence-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15720892 (2017, 84 points, 39 comments)
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695580 (2025, 100 points, 52 comments)
black_puppydog|1 month ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_rhyme
gerdesj|1 month ago
Ericson2314|1 month ago
I did enjoy reading this, but "right branching" / "left branching" aside, this is still more soft cultural commentary than hard linguistics. Even on that level, what seemed glaringly missing was more prose/poetry distinction --- did writing change overall? is prose a new category? or did the boundary between prose and poetry shift? (e.g. maybe before rhyme distinguished poetry, and rhythm was every, and then later rhythm distinguished poetry and rhyme was optional. I'm just guessing.) "Speechified" is a funny term when poetry traditionally was meant to spoken. (Maybe a good left-coded cultural reference to balance all the right-coded ones would be the e're-helpful reminder that spoken, non-melodic poetry thus remains very much part of our vernacular culture.)
Also, if you want to make a JKV vs Coverdale distinction, please don't also skip between psalms and regular story-telling passages. Those are in a very different style regardless of translator! Better to show different translations of the same passage to prove the point, but of course that would not work so well.
For example, yes for most of the couple psalms I glanced at, Coverdale is definitely better poetry than King James, but for the most famous Psalm 23 https://biblehub.com/coverdale/psalms/23.htm https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2023&vers..., KJV blows Coverdale out of the water.
My kingdom for a linguist credentialed enough to write in, say, Quanta Magazine, with an art/literature passion on the side, to write on this topic with more precision and proof.
quuxplusone|1 month ago
Instead we get an example from the Bible (Psalms 100:4), displaying characteristic parallelism but still with perfectly modern sentence structure: "Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name."
And then we get a new section heading, "Modern English emerges with bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," quoting an identically constructed sentence from the same Bible (Acts 4:8–9): "Ye rulers of the people, and elders of Israel, [consider] the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole," etc.
If there's any distinction to be made there, surely it's that the former quotation is from Hebrew and the latter from Greek — but then isn't it rather a little surprising that the exact same rhetorical device, this specific type of parallelism, should be used, than that there should be anything different about the structure of these two verses? But then — guess what — there's nothing different about their structure at all!
So what's the deal with that whole section (or pair of sections), and what actually is the author's thesis? What is the "great shift" mentioned in the headline?
If the thesis is that there was some big shift in sentence structure circa 1600, I'd say it's just demonstrably wrong. Look for example at Chaucer, circa 1400: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/tale-melibee-0 Nothing unusual about those sentences, is there?
ggm|1 month ago
Doesn't mention Thomas Mann, or Proust. Two exemplars of people who felt the comma and semicolon justified parenthetical statements which run to the page count length, not the word count length, in coruscating piles. I think Proust was having a lend of us, it's "tristram shandy" shaggy dog stories brought into the modern era by an aesthete. I think Thomas Mann just didn't know how to stop.
cperciva|1 month ago
mmooss|1 month ago
The people writing books are generally professional longform writers with professional editors. That's a different population than your officemates, Twitter, or even journalists (who are professional writers, of a different sort).
gerdesj|1 month ago
However, none of those examples are actually ambiguous. I'm pretty sure that those examples translated word for word into any language would also be understandable.
retrac|1 month ago
eat man lion. lion man eat. man eat lion. eat lion man.
Who is eating who? When formed according to English grammar it doesn't leave any ambiguity even if the phrase is improbable: "The biscuit has eaten the girl."
Linguistic topology is the study of patterns in languages according to structure. It's a niche topic which is unfortunate because certain patterns hint at something about the structure of human thought.
Such as with word order. Verb in the middle or at the start or at the end? Subject before verb or after verb? Object before verb or after verb? Every permutation does exist in some language.
But object before subject and verb is extremely rare. And in the few languages which do it that way they do not do consistently with it often only occurring in certain moods or certain conditions of syntactic alignment.
To the mind not natural Yoda's speech is.
readthenotes1|1 month ago
The third one is technically incorrect because of subject-verb number disagreement -- but ignoring that is common in some vernaculars
readthenotes1|1 month ago
My first grade teacher told me never start a sentence with but or and.
In this case, the second sentence could equally have been written as just another clause
renewiltord|1 month ago
AdieuToLogic|1 month ago
> My first grade teacher told me never start a sentence with but or and.
One of my elementary school teachers also taught me to use past participles, which means the quote from the article should have been written thusly:
It is amusing that an article dedicated to enumerating the degeneration of English prose uses simplistic sentence structure as well as malformed sentences, such as the above.rayiner|1 month ago
nullorempty|1 month ago
ofalkaed|1 month ago
>So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelias was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through 'and' as it opens,—there—there—we're here!...in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech...ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.
William Gass - On Being Blue.
pointbob|1 month ago
[deleted]