Combining long, medium, and short sentences in your memoir: Make them "jig, jive, waltz, boogie, strut, and stroll"

 

Recently we've focused on ways to craft your memoir's sentences. Why? Because you want to draw your readers in, you want to entertain them. And especially: You want to keep them reading.

We started by looking at short sentences and sentence fragments—they offer impact and punch. (Click on Sentences are a little like purses if you missed it.)

Next, we looked at using long sentences in your memoir. (Click on The beauty of long sentences as well as Especially for wordsmiths, ink-slingers, and painters of words.) 

Today we’ll look at the importance of varying sentence length—that is, writing short, simple sentences, medium-length sentences, as well as long, complex ones. 

This is how Joseph F. Williams explains it: 

“A clear and concise sentence is a singular achievement, a whole passage of them even more so. But if all your sentences were so concise that they never exceeded 20 words, you’d be like a pianist who could play only a few notes at a time. . . . 

"A competent writer must therefore know both how to write clear short sentences, and how to combine those short sentences into one that is longer and more complex, but just as concise and just as easy to understand.” (Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace; emphasis mine) 

 “Don’t write words, write music,” writes author Gary Provost. “Great writing moves you effortlessly through the words; reading becomes as quick as thought. Part of mastering flow, this ‘music’ in writing, means understanding the interplay between short sentences and long sentences.” 

Provost explains the importance of finding such a harmony in his book 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing: 

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. 

“Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important. 

“So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.” (100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, Gary Provost; emphasis mine)

Monica Sharman says this about Provost's sentences, above: "See what he did there? . . . By simply varying sentence length, he gave it life. Hear the pulse? Don't flatline your writing. Give it a heartbeat, a rhythm, a singing pulse. Make the sentences undulate, like verdant rolling hills or sea-blue waves or a dancer's movements. Then watch your story dance—or hear it sing." 

Over at Enchanting Marketing's blog, Henneke asks: “Do you know whether your writing jigs or jives? Waltzes or boogies? Struts or strolls? 

“. . . Writing can stutter and stumble. Writing can flow so softly, it almost sends you to sleep. Writing can hop and skip, putting a smile on your face. 

“Rhythm is one of the most underrated aspects of writing. . . . 

“Rhythm creates a mood. Rhythm can make you rush ahead, or slow you down to quietly enjoy reading. . . . 

“In writing, rhythm is defined by punctuation and the stress patterns of words in a sentence. Long sentences sound smoother, while short sentences make your content snappier. . . .” Don’t miss Henneke’s article, Rhythm in Writing: How to Make Your Words Swing and Swirl.  

Your job, then, is to look over your memoir's rough draft 

and analyze the way you structure and combine sentences. 

String words together with rhythm, with texture. 

Make 'em sing. 

Read your rough draft aloud 

and listen for smoothness and cadence and melody—

or thuds. Or clunks. Or choppiness.

Especially for wordsmiths, ink-slingers, and painters of words

 

If you’re a wordsmith—an ink-slinger, a painter of words—you’ve been enjoying our lessons on the crafting of sentences.

We started by looking at short sentences and sentence fragments—they offer impact and punch. (Click on “Sentences are a little like purses” if you missed it.)

Next, we looked at using long sentences in your memoir. (Click on The beauty of long sentences.)

Today we’ll continue with long sentences. They can be very effective, but writers must be cautious because “Most of us aren’t terribly good at writing good, long sentences,” according to one of my favorite teachers, Peter Jacobi.

“If we write not-so-good long sentences for not-so-good readers,” Jacobi says, “confusion sets in—fast. The reader forgets by midsentence what the root of the sentence was about.” (The Magazine Article)

Here are today's tips for writing long sentences:

To test for clarity—or lack of it—in any sentence longer than three typed lines, Joseph F. Williams suggests you read it aloud. (His paragraph, below, will leave you with a smile.)

“If the process of reading one of your own long sentences gives you the feeling that you are about to run out of breath before you come to a place where you can pause in order to integrate all of the parts of the sentence to get a sense of how its whole fits together to communicate a single conceptual structure, you have identified a sentence that your readers are likely to wish that you had revised. Like that one.” (Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace)

Notice how other people write long sentences. Some don’t work—as Williams so cleverly showed us above—but others do work well.

Here’s an example of a brilliantly crafted sentence. It’s worth your time to linger and savor it:

“Riding down to Port Warwick from Richmond, the train begins to pick up speed on the outskirts of the city, past the tobacco factories with their ever-present haze of acrid, sweetish dust and past the rows of uniformly brown clapboard houses which stretch down the hilly streets for miles, it seems, the hundreds of rooftops all reflecting the pale lights of dawn; past the suburban roads still sluggish and sleepy with early morning traffic, and rattling swiftly now over the bridge which separates the last two hills where in the valley below you can see the James River winding beneath its acid-green crust of scum out beside the chemical plants and more rows of clapboard houses and into the woods beyond.” (from Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron, quoted in Elements of the Writing Craft by Robert Olmstead)

Olmstead helps us analyze Styron’s sentence:

“The weight of the train at ever-increasing speed [is] evoked in the first line, and the rest is the landscape that sweeps past our window. The images come to us rapidly and clearly because we are moving so quickly and because our eye focuses through the window as if it were the lens of a camera.”

That sentence “mirrors the action of the train,” writes Olmstead, “moving over the page the same way the train moves over the land. What the sentence says and does are the same.”

Olmstead points out how Styron crafted his long sentence (121 words!) so well: “ . . .  tobacco factories with their ever-present haze . . . sweetish dust and past the rows . . . brown clapboard houses which stretch down . . . for miles, it seems, the hundreds of rooftops all reflecting . . . roads still sluggish and sleepy with early morning traffic, and rattling swiftly. . . . ” and so on.

Here’s what Olmstead wants us to notice about Styron's sentence: “The words in italics are simple, but they make the sentence work. They are as important to master as the clever turn of phrase. They are like gristle or cartilage. They are the stuff between joints and bones that smoothes the action. Without them, the setting goes flat.”

Here's your assignment for this week: Retrieve your rough drafts and look for places long sentences would be effective.

Maybe you, too, have written a vignette about a train ride, or about lifting off a dirt airstrip in a six-seater plane in the jungle—or the desert. (I have.) Have you ever bungee jumped? What other scenes come to your mind—stories in which long sentences, like Styron’s, would work?

Don’t be intimidated: go ahead and experiment with long sentences because they can add texture and dimension and movement your writing.

Remember: “Very few sentences come out right the first time, 

or even the second or third time.” 

William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life) 

Read them aloud for clarity 

and if your experimental sentences don’t work, 

keep tweaking them—or even toss them, just for now.

Most of all, have fun!

 

The beauty of long sentences in your memoir

 

Last week we began looking at your memoir’s sentences: The way you write them can enhance your readers’ (a) enjoyment and (b) their understanding of your memoir’s message.

Specifically, we considered writing short sentences and sentence fragments for impact and punch. (Click on “Sentences are a little like purses” if you missed it.)

While those can be effective, you’ll want to vary your sentence lengths—combine short with long sentences—throughout your piece.  

Here Gregory Ciotti comments on both short and long sentences: “The stamina of a long sentence can build a tense, winding climb to the climax; like a roller coaster slowly ascending to the summit. In contrast, the economical short sentence is best suited to drive home a revelation.

“In every instance, a short sentence brings momentum to a halt; the interruption must be used to make a statement with teeth. Repetition weakens impact, so you’ll only have a handful of opportunities in each piece. Make them count.” (Gregory Ciotti; emphasis mine)

“There’ll always be a place for the short sentence,” Pico Iyer says, praising “compressed wisdom” and “elegant conciseness,” but he also says, “The long sentence opens up the very doors that a short sentence simply slams shut.”

Iyer describes a well-crafted long sentence as “ . . . the collection of clauses . . . many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions. . . .”

“I cherish [famous writer] Thomas Pynchon’s prose . . . not just because it’s beautiful, but because his long, impeccable sentences take me, with each clause, further from the normal and predictable, and deeper into dimensions I hadn’t dared contemplate. . . . 

“The promise of the long sentence is that it will take you beyond the known, far from shore, into depths and mysteries you can’t get your mind, or most of your words, around. . . .

“When I feel the building tension as Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ swells with clause after biblical clause . . . I feel as if I’m stepping out of the crowded, overlighted fluorescent culture of my local convenience store and being taken up to a very high place from which I can see across time and space, in myself and in the world.” (Pico Iyer, “The WritingLife: The point of the long and winding sentence,” Special to the Los Angeles Times; emphasis mine)

Next week, we’ll look at long sentences again. Between now and then, look over your rough drafts and experiment with writing both short and long sentences. (Click here to review our recent post about writing short sentences.)

Set your writing aside for a few days and then read it aloud.

Be alert to how your sentences sound.

How do the strings of words feel to your lips and in your mouth? And in your ears and your brain? Your heart?

Reading aloud will help you discern when a sentence is clunky and awkward.

Rework those sentences so your readers will get your point, your meaning, your significance.