[hodgehog11]

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?

[CGMthrowaway]

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.

[yurishimo]

> concomitant

Thanks for the new word! Native speaker but I’ve never seen/heard that one before. Might be more common in a commonwealth country though tbf.

[AdieuToLogic]

> Yes. A long sentence can be thought of as a room, not a hallway.

The irony of this post having an initial sentence consisting of one word is either a sublime statement regarding the topic at hand or an unintentional affirmation of the subsequent factors enumerated.

[bagatelle]

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!)

[hodgehog11]

Thanks for the reference! I think this very neatly puts into words some impressions that I've had about these long sentences. There is certainly nuance to it, as long sentences can feel exhausting if constructed inappropriately.

[Exoristos]

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.

[hodgehog11]

I definitely agree there is a strong element of this, especially in the last few decades.

Perhaps it is also due to a widening of the audience that can provide literary criticism back to the author. Only the educated wealthy individuals with connections could offer critiques in the Victorian era of fiction; now it is anyone with a social media account. Judging by the failure of widespread peer review in "hype" research fields, I'm not sure this is a good thing.

[cyberax]

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.

[inkyoto]

> 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.

There is no grammatical ceiling on sentence length in Sinitic languages, Chinese languages (all of them) can form long sentences, and they all do possess a great many connecting words. Computational work on Chinese explicitly talks about «long Chinese sentences» and how to parse them[0].

However, many Chinese varieties and writing styles often rely more on parataxis[1] than English does, so relations between clauses are more often (but not always) conveyed by meaning, word order, aspect, punctuation, and discourse context, rather than by obligatory overt conjunctions. That is a tendency, not an inability.

[0] https://nlpr.ia.ac.cn/2005papers/gjhy/gh77.pdf

[1] https://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/127800/1/Content.pdf

[cyberax]

Sure. You can try to create arbitrarily long sentences with nested clauses in Chinese. Just like in English you can create arbitrarily long sentences like: "I live in a house which was built by the builders which were hired by the owner who came from England on a steamship which was built...".

But it feels unnatural. So most Chinese sentences are fairly short as a result. And it's also why commas, stops, and even spacing between words are a fairly recent invention. They are simply not needed when the text is formed of implicitly connected statements that don't need to be deeply nested.

To give an example, here's our favorite long-winded Ishmael: "Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains." The Chinese translation is: "是的，这里坐着的是一群老水手，其中有很多人，在怒海中会毫不畏怯地登到巨鲸的背上——那可是他们一无所知的东西啊——眼都不眨地把鲸鱼斗死；然而，这时他们一起坐在公共的早餐桌上——同样的职业，同样的癖好——他们却互相羞怯地打量着对方，仿佛是绿山山从未出过羊圈的绵羊"

Or word-for-word: "Yes, here sitting [people] are the group of old sailors, among them there are many people, [who] in the middle of the raging sea can/will without fear on the whale's back climb. That whales were something they knew nothing about".

The subordinate clauses become almost stand-alone statements, and it's up to the reader to connect them.

[inkyoto]

I can see your point now, and we are in agreement that nested clauses are uncommon and at the very least sound unnatural in Sinitic languages, but it is distinct from «The sentences simply can't be very long and often don't have any connecting words between sentences».

Strictly speaking, complex nested clauses are slowly on the way out of English as well due to the analytical nature of its present form, which is what the cited article partially laments, and remain a distinctive feature of highly inflected languages (German, Scandinavian, Slavic, etc.).

[bitwize]

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.

[inkyoto]

> 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.

[shoobiedoo]

likewise. they are staggeringly beautiful when your mind is in "the zone". It's like a kind of focused meditation with images just flooding the mind

[tayo42]

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.