When writing (and ghostwriting), I was often gently scolded by a client because I was not adhering to the main rules: short sentences and no more than three per paragraph, an encouraged use of bullet points in the body of the article wherever possible, and a final run-through the Hemingway App to shave it down as tightly as possible to getting a green score and making it perfect for a fourth grader to read should a fourth grader be interested in reading blog posts about various industry topics. I understood somewhat; this was writing not for the ages, but for search engines, serving only to keep fresh content on a website selling something else.
However, doing this (to some lesser degree) in the books I was asked to write pained me.
"But this is a book," I would say. "This is actually meant to be read."
No joy. And worse, by doing this so much, it started to affect my own writing. It wasn't long before bullet points started popping up in my own work, like some weird virus that took unhatched thoughts and dropped them in a list and called it good. I try to find some middle ground, now, and depending on the type of thing I'm writing, might allow a bullet list ("how to make cookies" or God forbid "how to be a better writer backed by science"), but I'm trying to shed that indoctrination as far as doing it as the standard instead of as a natural flow of the written thing. If a short sentence pops up naturally, welcome, little fellow.
What really got me in your article was the concept of bro poetry, that way of writing Very Important Thoughts perfect for a TEDx talk in which each sentence mic-drops its way clumsily into relevance, pretending that the white space—by suggesting such great thoughts can't be allowed to be crowded out by other thoughts—isn't what's really doing all the work. The first time I saw this was several years ago, on Facebook of all places, that great purveyor of deep thoughts, and I was confused. I like poetry, and I kept reading the post over and over trying to figure out what was happening with it. Is it poetry? Is Facebook inserting paragraphs in this guy's writing? Why is he doing this? Of all the things I see in writing today, it's one of the most annoying. Some of those sentences, especially since they are so short, are lonely; they need the emotional support of the others, and it feels like I'm in some writing boudoir where the sentences aren't fully clothed; it's embarrassing for all involved.
I love everything about this response. I’ve done some ghost writing over the years; it’s enough of a challenge to get the author’s voice. But it’s worse when the author has bought into some of these rules but doesn’t know the first thing about why those rules exist or how/if they should be followed. Also “welcome, little fellow” and “writing boudoir”! Perfect.
I also love everything about the comment- and about your essay, Joel.
(sometimes I am so grateful that I am not a writer, and don't have to listen to all the advice- kill this, trim that, tighten here, polish there, don't start with a name in the first sentence of yours (yep, was just about to wake up Kafka, tell him how he screwed up in "Metamorphosis") and all this incessant buzzing )
Reading some of the posts here that are full of short, single-sentence paragraphs kind of makes me feel like I'm driving down a divided highway with a stop sign every hundred feet.
Thanks for a great reminder. Moran’s book is wonderfully useful to me—finish the sentence in your head before sloshing words around the screen. As my favorite Roberto Bolano said, to paraphrase, ignore all the rules.
My eldest son did karate when he was young. I remember his sensei telling him at one point—this is like 16 or 17 years ago now—“the kata isn’t the move.” The point of memorizing the kata is so you can improvise. No fight follows a guidebook. Same with writing. Style guides don’t dictate narratives or how we put them together. We improvise and respond as the narrative seems to require.
If we only write in short sentences, I fear we'll only be able to think in short sentences. I think we're beginning to see this in the surrounding culture already.
Interesting angle. Could be some truth to that. We definitely show a disturbing lack of critical engagement and a penchant for reductionistic thinking.
Agree with the article, but the paragraph about authors who revel in transgression reads like a nightmare catalog. Thanks for warning me away from that list of books. There are too many other books to read. I don't need to torture myself with those, whether or not they received awards.
This was a thoroughly enjoyable read. I am forwarding the article to my high school senior students who need this advice terribly. Thanks for the wisdom in witty and winsome language.
Thank you for sharing that how to write a sentence doesn't have to be formulaic to meet the minds of our times. Short or long isn't as important as the message. The reader will hang in there if the message is thought-provoking or entertaining or engaging enough to keep them in the story.
Ellroy was over on one of his novels and was told to shorten the work. He invented, as he says, “telegraph style.” But his invention went beyond the EB White advice. Another noir writer, Elmore Leonard said “eliminate all the boring parts” but that really says nothing about writing that swoons and sways.
Noir is a great example of the short-sentence convention working well, but that goes to my argument. It works because it conveys a certain feeling that crime authors are trying to evoke. The terseness propels the narrative and mimics the matter-of-factness of the detective’s own mind. Philip Marlowe has to keep his facts—the few he can gather—straight, which is tortuously difficult. But no one writes Regency romance like that because the author is going for an entirely different effect.
Hopkins said poetry had to be read aloud because the sound of it is so important. I don't know that I would say "has to," but certainly prose benefits from being read aloud. It should sound good! As a reader, there are books I enjoy reading aloud, and books I loathe reading aloud. Good writing feels good to speak, and varying sentence lengths and constructions are part of what makes it so.
Welcome advice for writers (and readers). I like this sentence in particular: Confusion comes from losing the sentence’s center of gravity. I so enjoy reading your essays. PS, despite his acclaim as a writer, I'm often lost in Faulkner's sentences, and don't get me started on Celine.
The response to Faulkner is fair. Not everybody’s cup of … bourbon. Sometimes that’s just a taste thing. Other times it’s a time of life thing. Writers that work for us in one season don’t always in the next. And writers that put us off in one season might become electric to us later. I’m finding that right now with Dostoevsky.
Very true. I often go back to authors I struggled with a decade ago to see if I missed something. Virginia Woolf was like that for me. Now, I love to read her work.
Great article Joel, but this Okie just can't get into Shakespeare. Give me ⚜️ Saint Benedict of Nursia, St Maximus the 🩸🗡️📚 Confessor or Vladimir Lossky 🇷🇺☦️🇫🇷🪔 anytime. (oh yeah, I prefer 🇬🇧 Chesterton over Lewis or Tolkien any day!)
When writing (and ghostwriting), I was often gently scolded by a client because I was not adhering to the main rules: short sentences and no more than three per paragraph, an encouraged use of bullet points in the body of the article wherever possible, and a final run-through the Hemingway App to shave it down as tightly as possible to getting a green score and making it perfect for a fourth grader to read should a fourth grader be interested in reading blog posts about various industry topics. I understood somewhat; this was writing not for the ages, but for search engines, serving only to keep fresh content on a website selling something else.
However, doing this (to some lesser degree) in the books I was asked to write pained me.
"But this is a book," I would say. "This is actually meant to be read."
No joy. And worse, by doing this so much, it started to affect my own writing. It wasn't long before bullet points started popping up in my own work, like some weird virus that took unhatched thoughts and dropped them in a list and called it good. I try to find some middle ground, now, and depending on the type of thing I'm writing, might allow a bullet list ("how to make cookies" or God forbid "how to be a better writer backed by science"), but I'm trying to shed that indoctrination as far as doing it as the standard instead of as a natural flow of the written thing. If a short sentence pops up naturally, welcome, little fellow.
What really got me in your article was the concept of bro poetry, that way of writing Very Important Thoughts perfect for a TEDx talk in which each sentence mic-drops its way clumsily into relevance, pretending that the white space—by suggesting such great thoughts can't be allowed to be crowded out by other thoughts—isn't what's really doing all the work. The first time I saw this was several years ago, on Facebook of all places, that great purveyor of deep thoughts, and I was confused. I like poetry, and I kept reading the post over and over trying to figure out what was happening with it. Is it poetry? Is Facebook inserting paragraphs in this guy's writing? Why is he doing this? Of all the things I see in writing today, it's one of the most annoying. Some of those sentences, especially since they are so short, are lonely; they need the emotional support of the others, and it feels like I'm in some writing boudoir where the sentences aren't fully clothed; it's embarrassing for all involved.
I love everything about this response. I’ve done some ghost writing over the years; it’s enough of a challenge to get the author’s voice. But it’s worse when the author has bought into some of these rules but doesn’t know the first thing about why those rules exist or how/if they should be followed. Also “welcome, little fellow” and “writing boudoir”! Perfect.
I also love everything about the comment- and about your essay, Joel.
(sometimes I am so grateful that I am not a writer, and don't have to listen to all the advice- kill this, trim that, tighten here, polish there, don't start with a name in the first sentence of yours (yep, was just about to wake up Kafka, tell him how he screwed up in "Metamorphosis") and all this incessant buzzing )
What a delightful comment
What a splendid essay! Thank you for your astute insights communicated eloquently.
Thank you! It was fun to write, and it’s been grating on me for years now :)
Reading some of the posts here that are full of short, single-sentence paragraphs kind of makes me feel like I'm driving down a divided highway with a stop sign every hundred feet.
Haha! So true. It complete undermines the communication. Those lines start to feel like punches after a while. Why are we punching readers?!
Thanks for a great reminder. Moran’s book is wonderfully useful to me—finish the sentence in your head before sloshing words around the screen. As my favorite Roberto Bolano said, to paraphrase, ignore all the rules.
My eldest son did karate when he was young. I remember his sensei telling him at one point—this is like 16 or 17 years ago now—“the kata isn’t the move.” The point of memorizing the kata is so you can improvise. No fight follows a guidebook. Same with writing. Style guides don’t dictate narratives or how we put them together. We improvise and respond as the narrative seems to require.
I feel like you could have sub title called this, “scuse me while I kiss the sky.”
Haha!
If we only write in short sentences, I fear we'll only be able to think in short sentences. I think we're beginning to see this in the surrounding culture already.
Interesting angle. Could be some truth to that. We definitely show a disturbing lack of critical engagement and a penchant for reductionistic thinking.
Agree with the article, but the paragraph about authors who revel in transgression reads like a nightmare catalog. Thanks for warning me away from that list of books. There are too many other books to read. I don't need to torture myself with those, whether or not they received awards.
LOL. Just some extremes to prove the point. Different strokes!
This was a thoroughly enjoyable read. I am forwarding the article to my high school senior students who need this advice terribly. Thanks for the wisdom in witty and winsome language.
My pleasure! I hope it helps your students!
Your 100 % correct. A sentence should be as long as it needs to be to show its point.
Yes. It really is that simple.
Thank you for sharing that how to write a sentence doesn't have to be formulaic to meet the minds of our times. Short or long isn't as important as the message. The reader will hang in there if the message is thought-provoking or entertaining or engaging enough to keep them in the story.
Yes! The only real question is, “Is it interesting?” Interest holds attention. If that’s not the point, then what are we doing anyway?
Ellroy was over on one of his novels and was told to shorten the work. He invented, as he says, “telegraph style.” But his invention went beyond the EB White advice. Another noir writer, Elmore Leonard said “eliminate all the boring parts” but that really says nothing about writing that swoons and sways.
Noir is a great example of the short-sentence convention working well, but that goes to my argument. It works because it conveys a certain feeling that crime authors are trying to evoke. The terseness propels the narrative and mimics the matter-of-factness of the detective’s own mind. Philip Marlowe has to keep his facts—the few he can gather—straight, which is tortuously difficult. But no one writes Regency romance like that because the author is going for an entirely different effect.
Hopkins said poetry had to be read aloud because the sound of it is so important. I don't know that I would say "has to," but certainly prose benefits from being read aloud. It should sound good! As a reader, there are books I enjoy reading aloud, and books I loathe reading aloud. Good writing feels good to speak, and varying sentence lengths and constructions are part of what makes it so.
Welcome advice for writers (and readers). I like this sentence in particular: Confusion comes from losing the sentence’s center of gravity. I so enjoy reading your essays. PS, despite his acclaim as a writer, I'm often lost in Faulkner's sentences, and don't get me started on Celine.
The response to Faulkner is fair. Not everybody’s cup of … bourbon. Sometimes that’s just a taste thing. Other times it’s a time of life thing. Writers that work for us in one season don’t always in the next. And writers that put us off in one season might become electric to us later. I’m finding that right now with Dostoevsky.
Very true. I often go back to authors I struggled with a decade ago to see if I missed something. Virginia Woolf was like that for me. Now, I love to read her work.
!
Precisely.
Great article Joel, but this Okie just can't get into Shakespeare. Give me ⚜️ Saint Benedict of Nursia, St Maximus the 🩸🗡️📚 Confessor or Vladimir Lossky 🇷🇺☦️🇫🇷🪔 anytime. (oh yeah, I prefer 🇬🇧 Chesterton over Lewis or Tolkien any day!)
I enjoy watching Shakespeare—and listening—more than reading him. I might undertake a Shakespeare challenge at some point to see what happens :)
Large Language Models and 👨🏻🏫🪞🤔 ♥️🔔 Education in the ✍🏼 ⛪ ☦️ ⏰ Polis. Specifically written at the ninth grade level:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/a5a770b1-36a3-4a63-ac04-cd03e9b0a51b