When it comes to prose style in contemporary literature, no two works have had a greater influence than George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” and Strunk and White’s 1918 volume The Elements of Style. Orwell’s essay argues against the influence of political language on English prose and calls for a return to simple and direct style (He includes a list of rules that range from the mildly controversial—“Never use a long word where a short one will do.”—to the more strange and jingoistic—“Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.”). Strunk and White’s book, meanwhile, written in a style that previews the BuzzFeed listicles of today, calls for a similar direct and simple style, advising us to “write with nouns and verbs” (Rule 4), “avoid fancy words” (Rule 14), and, most famously, “omit needless words” (Rule 17)—essentially the same piece of advice that Orwell gives us when he says “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” But the truth is, following these rules as closely as their writers demand leads to some awfully dull prose. Sentences become curt. Ideas become truncated. You lose rhythmic variation. Your prose sounds like a drumbeat. No, what Orwell and Strunk and White fail to see is the extraordinary virtue of the long sentence, the cumulative sentence as grammarians have come to call it, in which a long, beautiful series of clauses and modifiers unfurls across the page like a banner in the wind, a flow of ideas that not only captures that natural rhythms of human thought but also through its length achieves a nuance and sophistication that a shorter sentence never could and thus demonstrates in all its complexity the true power of English grammar.
In his wonderful 2013 book Building Great Sentences, University of Iowa writing professor Brooks Landon makes the case for long sentences and thus implicitly challenges the assumptions of Orwell, Strunk, and White. “A long sentence is not necessarily a better sentence,” Landon writes, “but a sentence containing more useful information, more specific detail, and more explanation will almost always be better than a shorter sentence that lacks information, detail, and explanation.” And while Landon discusses a variety of sentences types, including periodic and mixed sentences, his book centers on the cumulative sentence, in which the main clause comes first and is followed by a succession of modifiers and subordinate clauses. As he puts it:
Cumulative sentences that start with a brief base clause and then start picking up new information, much as a snowball gets larger as it rolls downhill, fascinate me with their ability to add information that actually makes the sentence easier to read and more satisfying because it starts answering questions as quickly as an inquisitive reader might think of them, using each modifying phrase to clarify what has gone before, and to reduce the need for subsequent explanatory sentences, flying in the face of the received idea that cutting words rather than adding them is the most effective way to improve writing, reminding us that while in some cases, less is indeed more, in many cases, more is more, and more is what our writing needs.
As Landon notes, his argument in favor of the cumulative sentence is based on the work of English professor Francis Christensen, who in his 1963 essay “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence” argues that “[t]he rhythm of good modern prose comes about equally from the multiple-tracking of coordinate constructions and the downshifting and backtracking of free modifiers” and then develops four key rules for good cumulative sentences. Christensen’s ideas, Landon notes, are in turn based on the ideas of novelist and professor John Erskine, who in his 1946 essay “The Craft of Writing” made the argument, seemingly radical in the face of Orwell, Strunk, and White’s theories, that precision in writing doesn’t come from subtracting words, but instead from adding them—essentially that the more phrases and clauses you have in a sentence, the more precise that sentence really is. Adding to this, he argues that it’s not the noun or the verb that is the most important part of a sentence, but rather the modifier, which allows one to add more precise information. “The noun, the verb, and the main clause,” Erskine writes, “serve merely as a base on which meaning will rise. The modifier is the essential part of any sentence.”
To demonstrate the power of long, cumulative sentences, Landon gives several examples from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a classic work whose prose has rightly been heralded as exemplary. I’ll go with a more contemporary example, though, to show how the power of cumulative syntax doesn’t need to be associated with a particular era. Here is a sentence from Zia Haider Rahman’s magnificent 2014 novel In the Light of What We Know, in which the protagonist, feeling anxious, takes a long walk through Dubai:
I set off without direction, and I walked and walked in a place where there’s no walking to be done, where air-conditioned cars link air-conditioned buildings, illuminated by the fiercest streetlights in the world, and I think of the whole of the city, the people who inhabit its halls, who sleep now and breathe its recycled air, and whose activities by day animate this strip of land on the rim of the desert, and I remember, because this thought is always a memory, that they will all one day be gone, that every one of them will be taken outside and pushed into the sand, that in a hundred years, or two hundred years to be certain, every human being here, every lover and loser, every captain of industry and every hotel cleaner, every mother and father, and every child will be no more, and that these buildings will stand, not all of them, but enough will peservere without them.
It’s an incredible sentence, one which not only manages to capture the narrator’s experience of walking through this unique city but also achieves the precision that Landon argues makes a long sentence powerful. Each new modifier and clause gives us more information about the cityscape of Dubai, “the fiercest streetlights in the world,” the “recycled air,” the “strip of land on the rim of the desert” and eventually more information about the narrator’s melancholy thoughts. Most importantly, the fact that the whole thing is one sentence directly links the narrator’s walking to his reflection on the transience of human beings, a powerful effect that splitting the sentence into two would have ruined. If Rahman had followed Orwell and Strunk and White’s advice to “omit needless words”, I doubt he would have come up with a sentence as good as this one.
For me, though, the master of the long sentence is a writer who I’ve mentioned many, many, many, many, many, many, many times before on this blog. And so, to conclude, here is Thomas Pynchon in one of my favorite passages from The Crying of Lot 49, following protagonist Oedipa Maas as she makes her way through the U.C. Berkeley campus. Once again, it’s the cumulative structures that allow Pynchon to stack detail upon detail and create an effect that he could never have achieved with a series of shorter sentences:
She came downslope from Wheeler Hall, through Sather Gate, into a plaza teeming with corduroy, denim, bare legs, blonde hair, hornrims, bicycle spokes in the sun, bookbags, swaying card tables, long paper petitions dangling to earth, posters for undecipherable FSM’s, YAF’s, VDC’s, suds in the fountain, students in nose-to-nose dialogue. She moved through it carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternate universes it would take. For she had undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat among not only her fellow students but also most of the visible structure around and ahead of them, this having been a national reflex to certain pathologies in high places only death had the power to cure, and this Berkeley was like no somnolent Siwash out of her own past at all, but more akin to those Far Eastern or Latin American universities you read about, those autonomous culture media where the most beloved folklores may be brought into doubt, cataclysmic of dissents voiced, suicidal of commitments chosen—the sort that bring governments down. But it was English she was hearing as she crossed Bancroft Way among the blonde children and the muttering Hondas and Suzukis; American English.