Let Syntax Think

On a working rule of ours, the end of a sentence receives the most stress and the beginning the next most, so what you put in the middle is quietly subordinated. What a writer subordinates and what she coordinates tells the reader what she thinks matters. Length is only the visible part.

Sample (invented): Though she knew it would cost her the job, she stayed.

Sample (invented): She stayed, knowing it would cost her the job, knowing too that there would be no other afternoon in which the choice was still hers.

Sample (invented): She stayed. It would cost her the job. She knew that. She stayed.

In the first, the cost comes before the decision and is overridden, and it is a story of resolve. In the second the decision comes first and the awareness trails after it, widening into something larger than the job. The third has no deliberation at all, only a bare act repeated. None of the three is correct, since each says what the writer thinks the choice is.

In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price has refused a proposal and been scolded for it, and when the dinner is finally over Austen gives her evening in one sentence. In the text as Project Gutenberg prints it, the evening “set in with more composure to Fanny” than she could have hoped, and then the sentence turns to what Fanny tells herself: she trusted, “in the first place,” that she had done right, and was willing to hope, “secondly,” that her uncle’s displeasure was abating, and would abate farther as he considered the matter “with more impartiality,” and felt, “as a good man must feel, how wretched, and how unpardonable, how hopeless, and how wicked it was to marry without affection.” (Editions differ in punctuation; the words are the same.) “In the first place” and “secondly” are a nervous mind arranging its comforts as an argument, as if enumeration made them true. The sentence is long because the reassurance is long. Its weight falls on the last clause, which also goes on a little too long, four adjectives in a pair of pairs, and in that overrun we hear Fanny hoping her uncle will feel what she needs him to feel. Ursula K. Le Guin discusses the passage in Steering the Craft, observing that the length of the sentence gives weight to its last clause while the rhythmic repetitions keep it from being heavy.

Sentences also go wrong by sameness, all arriving in one shape, subject, verb, object, trailing phrase, until the reader hears a metronome, or by a reflex of length, all short or all long. Le Guin is blunt about it: no sentence length is best, and what serves is variety. Prose of only short, simple sentences, she says, gives a false simplicity; long sentences require clear connections or they sag. Verlyn Klinkenborg, in Several Short Sentences About Writing, argues that strong long sentences are really strong short sentences joined in various ways, and that long ones tend to collapse, the end of a long sentence commonly forgetting its beginning. Which of them is right depends on you. If your long sentences forget themselves, Klinkenborg’s discipline is a cure; if your short ones thump, take Le Guin’s variety.

Practice. Pick a sentence of your own that carries a decision, a reversal or a feeling. Write it three ways: main clause first with trailing qualification; main clause delayed to the end; three or more short sentences. Read each aloud and mark where the stress lands, since it will fall on the last words. For each, write one line saying what it treats as important and what it subordinates. Choose one, or build a hybrid, and say why. Fifteen minutes.