Are long sentences inherently bad, or what?

[KloKandall]

I've had a couple of beta readers caution me about run-on sentences. But I write a lot of action scenes, and it just feels like long sentences fit those, to carry momentum and danger and excitement. Also, when a character is taking in their environment and noting various things about it, it just feels awkward to chop it all up into little pieces.

Is this one of those things people say just because writing courses say so, or do people honestly not like long sentences, no matter the context? I don't remember ever minding.

 

[Valtharius]

I suppose like everything, some readers will love it, some won't mind, some will hate it, and some won't even notice. Natural human speech isn't divided neatly into grammatical sentences and older writers felt no such constraints, so go for it is my advice.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Normally action scenes work better with short sentences but your preference in writing style is relevant too

 

[Ursa major]

I've had a couple of beta readers caution me about run-on sentences.

Just a thought, but as one can have long sentences without them being run-on sentences, perhaps the complaints you're getting are solely about the latter and not the former.

 

[ckatt]

I've always heard that shorter sentences are better for action because they convey a higher pace. Where as longer sentences take more time to parse so they slow the reader giving more time to process a more complex idea. I tend to agree with this. The simple structure of a short sentence, just a simple subject and verb, can be comprehended in a glance, so I find them to be inherently faster.

 

[tinkerdan]

run-on sentences.

Run on sentences are bad yes, however long sentences are okay where they fit.

But I write a lot of action scenes, and it just feels like long sentences fit those, to carry momentum and danger and excitement.

Probably not a good place for long sentences as has been mentioned above. Also this might explain the run-on sentences. Most of the time in action scenes there are many actions that should be kept separate from each other lest someone think the person is doing all sorts of things at once in some impossible manner.

Also, when a character is taking in their environment and noting various things about it, it just feels awkward to chop it all up into little pieces.

Good place if the action in the scene is slow or nearly nonexistent and allowing for it. Then try to create a progression of dependent clauses that add depth to the sentence, such as.

He stepped through the doorway and stopped in the vast room with varied chandeliers, casting eerie shadows, of a multiple dancers on the floor, creating a rotoscoping effect that dazed, confused and nauseated him.

Is this one of those things people say just because writing courses say so, or do people honestly not like long sentences, no matter the context? I don't remember ever minding.

No, usually the advice is avoid run-on sentences and learn how to craft long sentences before over abusing them.

There is a series of classes that The Great Courses has.

One class that would help you is:
Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft.

The Great Courses

www.thegreatcourses.com

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

The perceived wisdom (i.e. what I teach in writing classes!) is that sentence length should be varied. Mostly long sentences is as bad as mostly short ones. By mixing and matching, it helps the story flow and stay interesting.
I’d also agree with those above who say that action scenes are often better delivered by shorter sentences (at least some of them). Think of the breathlessness of excitement.
If in doubt, read passages aloud and see how they sound and how easy it is to breathe through them. It’s a great way to highlight clunky sentences.
And as a last resort, there are resources such as Grammarly and Pro Writing Aid that can help you hammer out any of these issues and more (e.g. overuse of certain words, etc.). I believe you can get free versions or free trials maybe?
Definitely worth asking beta readers to explain in more detail what they thought wasn’t working. If more than one is highlighting this as an issue, it must be something that’s making them stumble and therefore worth listening to.

 

[Dan Jones]

I'd second Kerry's post, and would add that context is everything. I adore a well-constructed run-on sentence, and love using them. I think you can get a very dramatic sense of hypotyposis - an intense, unrelenting outpouring of text/information/emotion when a run-on sentence is used in the right way, and in the right place. But if they are over-used then they become tiresome and wearying. Personally I think you need great control and understanding of how the language in order to construct one properly. You need to be a master of using punctuation properly – commas, em-dashes, parentheses – in order to break the sentence up enough to provide the reader with enough markers to make sense of the thing.

I wouldn't usually do this, but I've pasted a very long run-on sentence that I've written in a novella below (it's the only run-on sentence I can think of off the top of my head without poring through The Name Of The Rose). I think it works because a) the narrator is an academic professor who knows how to speak and talk eloquently and at length about his chosen field of expertise; b) he is breathless and half-crazed after having a terrifying adventure; and c) a lot is happening at the same time.

When my academic career seemed to flounder in the face of my apparently increasingly outlandish fields of study – and oh! how I longed to inform my critics of the poetic irony of their denunciation of my apparent resorting to wallowing in the so-called imagined fury of emotion, in opposition to my career as student of Zeno – I visited the site of my adventure, flirting with the edges of the sinkhole, jostling among the end-of-the-world preachers (who had taken up permanent residence there, it seemed, in ironic opposition to their message of choice) to peer into the gloom, half-expecting Lion to clamber from the ruins and haul us all into the abyss, or for Pallas to leap from the darkness, sword raised, and to swipe a dozen of us puny humans aside as he made his way to the heavens to foolishly grapple with Athena and her cohorts.

I followed this sentence (it's actually a whole paragraph) with a one-word sentence for an almost ridiculous contrast in rhythm and pace.

But it's ultimately a matter of choice and taste. If you feel you can make a run-on sentence work, and you're using it in the right way, then use it.

 

[Wayne Mack]

I suggest going back to your beta readers, one on one, and asking for some examples of off-putting passages and then to describe how they reacted. I suspect that the readers are trying to tell you something, but that something is likely not about punctuation.

Something is jarring the readers out of a receptive mind set for the story. Without seeing the text, I could not hazard a guess at what the issue might be. Adding punctuation every N words may or may not solve the problem, but I suspect not. This may explain your hesitancy to take a simple fix. The correction may require a more detailed editing, but once one has a fuller understanding of the issue, then the problem can be resolved and one's writing improves.

Reader feedback is not a one way street. Do not try to justify the writing choices made, but seek to understand how the readers are reacting to the story and what is throwing them off track.

 

[alexvss]

I just remembered a Writing Excuses episode about this. Its name is wonderful: Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts in Just a Very Few Words Which Must Fit In A Very Very Small Box, With Patrick Rothfuss.

When you're out of excuses, go write.

 

[AlexH]

If your action scenes take place in settings you've already described, you won't need to break up the action by describing the setting so much during the action itself. And although your character could be different, if you put yourself in an action scene, how much of the setting would you actually notice? I bet it would only be what's important in that second, such as an obstacle to dodge or an item to pick up and use as a weapon. Not much else is important.

Sometimes I struggle to parse long sentences depending how they're written, but I don't think I have trouble with long sentences per se.

 

[elle telle]

So because of (insert day job here) I sometimes have to think about things like Flesch-Kincaid reading scores, which are essentially measures of how "readable" something is. Now, these scores are generally formulated to measure things like learning materials or news reporting so don't apply directly to creative writing in my opinion. However, it does mean we have actual science studying the impact of sentence length on reading comprehension, which essentially says that longer sentences are more difficult to comprehend. The UK government has a really nice round-up of links and resources on this.

Part of the reason these studies don't DIRECTLY apply to creative writing is because they are looking at situations where people are more likely to be scanning than reading in a focused way. However, I do think that the basic understanding of longer sentences as being harder to comprehend stands up, especially for particularly long sentences (ie 40+ words). Anecdotally, I certainly find particularly long sentences difficult to understand, and have to go back and re-read them multiple times to fully understand what's being communicated. And I find that to be true even when I'm doing "focused" reading, like reading a novel.

So all of this is to say, I don't think long sentences are inherently bad. But I do think that they can force readers to slow down, re-read, or miss points, which can break the flow of the reading experience. Sometimes that might be intentional, or important stylistically for a particular point or section. But I know that I personally find it frustrating if there are lots of very long sentences stacked on top of each other, because I have to slow down so much in order to understand what's happening.

 

[silentmetaphor]

I would like to learn this too. Seems that for me hardest aspect of writing is the balance and density of different ingredients in the dish. Also, I make too many advanced Grammatical mistakes ( this comment should be a decent example ).

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Sometimes the problem that readers point out is not the actual problem. That is, they correctly identify where a problem exists, but they misname or misidentify what is actually wrong. For instance, they will say that a writer uses too many long words, and then when asked to give examples they will point out words that are five or six letters long, which can be puzzling, until you realize that when they say "long words" they really mean "words I am not familiar with." In your case, it may be a problem with pacing and momentum, and not so much that you use long sentences but that you use them in the wrong places in the action of the story, so that you slow things down when you should be speeding them up. (Although I have read some long sentences, by particularly skilled writers, that have a tremendous sense of momentum, for action I agree that shorter sentences tend to work better—though even then, some variety in the length of sentences may keep the writing from coming across as too choppy. )

Also, as some have already pointed out up above, a very long sentence is not necessarily a run-on sentence and a run-on sentence is not necessarily long. A run-on sentence is a particular type of grammatical mistake. It can make the writing clunky, especially if the same sort of error is made again and again and again. Like sentence fragments, which are also ungrammatical, there are places where, for dramatic purposes, a run-on sentence may work, but it has to be done carefully. So you really do need to talk to your beta readers and find out if the problem is really run-on sentences. If it is, you may not have to shorten your sentences; it may be enough to fix the grammatical error. If they mean that your sentences tend to ramble on and and slow things down (or come across as pretentious) then that is what you need to address.

 

[marcmizz]

I think it all comes down to preference in the end. Personally, I prefer longer sentences (both to read and write), as I think it gives a more flowing feel to the narrative. The problem with long sentences however, is when many subjects come into play. Pulling it off can be tricky, and sometimes, the best course is to chunk up the sentence into smaller ones, to remove any doubt from the meaning you are trying to convey to the reader.

As Kerrybuchanan pointed out, reading the passage out aloud helps.

 

[ckatt]

Very Long Sentences in Fiction | CMOS Shop Talk

"A writer who deploys a long sentence had better know what they’re doing and why."

Just came across this on Twitter. thought it might be of some interest.

 

[paranoid marvin]

I dread to imagine what they would think of one of Sir Humphrey's sentences.

 

[JohnM]

I must echo one poster: "When you run out of excuses, write." I have had phone conversations with people who end up telling me that the only thing stopping them from finishing their novel is sitting down and finishing it. As far as long sentences, write what you want but think of your reader. Think about the way natural dialogue works. There are formulas for fiction in books and fiction in movies. In the case of sentences, there is no mathematics to it. Imagine reading your story to total strangers. What sounds natural?

Pacing is very important. Good stories have a certain rhythm. Action-adventure is a mix of action and personal scenes where the reader gets more information about the main character. It makes him three-dimensional. The same with supporting characters. The characters who are not central to the story appear and disappear.

Eventually, after putting in some time and getting to understand what makes for good writing and bad writing, along with telling the story you want to tell, you will know what works and what doesn't. I was recently handed a submission by someone who had good intentions but could not present his ideas well.

 

[ckatt]

I must echo one poster: "When you run out of excuses, write." I have had phone conversations with people who end up telling me that the only thing stopping them from finishing their novel is sitting down and finishing it. As far as long sentences, write what you want but think of your reader. Think about the way natural dialogue works. There are formulas for fiction in books and fiction in movies. In the case of sentences, there is no mathematics to it. Imagine reading your story to total strangers. What sounds natural?

Pacing is very important. Good stories have a certain rhythm. Action-adventure is a mix of action and personal scenes where the reader gets more information about the main character. It makes him three-dimensional. The same with supporting characters. The characters who are not central to the story appear and disappear.

Eventually, after putting in some time and getting to understand what makes for good writing and bad writing, along with telling the story you want to tell, you will know what works and what doesn't. I was recently handed a submission by someone who had good intentions but could not present his ideas well.

This is too true.
I think a lot of new writers get too hung up in conversations of craft.
If you're not hitting your word goals all the shop talk in the world won't get you there. And I think it's always easier to go back and adjust what you've written than it is to worry about technique while you're doing it.

 

[Cosmic Geoff]

I've never been clear what a run-on sentence is. I just looked in my 'How to Write' books and none of them have 'run-on sentence in the index. Anyway, I looked it up online and it says it means two clauses joined in an ungrammatical manner -something I would not do (I hope).
Long sentences are a different issue. If you are using prowritingaid (prowritingaid.com), it suggests that if the average length of a sentence in your writing is less that 12 words, you may be using too many short sentences, and a sentence of over 30 or 40 words is a 'long sentence'.
It is commonly suggested that one can with advantage use short sentences at a tense piece of action in a story, and I often do this. Also, I have found that if I include a very long sentence, critiquers tend to gripe about it.