In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence
25th January 2019
The style guides say: keep your sentences short. Write cleanly, cut as many words as you can, and don’t overburden your reader’s short-term memory by delaying the arrival of the full stop. But sometimes a sentence just needs to be long. The world resists our efforts to enclose it between a capital and a full stop. The sentence has to withhold its end because life is like that, refusing to fold itself neatly into subject, verb and object.
Long sentences are ideal for people who can keep up. Those of us who can keep up don’t have a lot of use for those who can’t.
For what it’s worth, I too love Frank Sinatra and Karen Carpenter.