A Rant About Progressives and Short Sentences and Argh Argh Argh
/rant-on/
I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft. I thought about long and short sentences. I wondered. How can I say something she hasn’t already said?
<er… no>
I was reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft. I was thinking about long and short sentences. I was wondering. How could I go about saying something she hadn’t already been saying?
<worse!>
I was reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, thinking about long and short sentences, and I wondered, how can I say something she hasn’t already said?
<much better>
In the first statement above, I used only simple present, what we used to call the indicative mood.
In the second, I used only the continuative, which apparently grammarians now call the progressive aspect.
In the third, I used a combination, and I also made it all one sentence.
Obviously there is no general rule here, nothing you can take and use every time, but it’s indicative (not grammatically!). The progressive aspect (was reading, is walking) is weak and clunky, but it lends itself naturally to flow, i.e., to continuation and connection with other bits and pieces. That positive quality vanishes when you use hard breaks, like periods, and you’re left with weakness.
The first example is bad because it’s got no rhythm or flow. It does have one good quality: the verbs act. “Read,” “thought,” “wondered,” “say,” “said.” Those are strong—not great, not exciting verbs, but strong. As soon as I make them continuative, adding “to be” in one or another form, they become weak, for somewhat the same reasons as passive voice is weak. (Passive voice: it was done by him. Active voice: he did it.) And in just the same way, passive voice works just dandy… providing that you use it to ensure smooth flow among elements.
If you’re going to write long sentences, you need linkage and flow.
<example: “you’re going to write” is not bad because it sets up the real verb, “need”>
If you’re going to insist on short sentences, you don’t need linkage or flow. Clunk clunk clunk happily down the track. Thud, crash. To my ear, “let’s just skip rhythm and grace” isn’t a good thing—but it’s necessary for lots of little sentences.
When the poo gets into the rotating blades, you get helpful criticism from other writers who BOTH (a) chop up sentences into little bits and (b) turn indicative verbs into continuative ones. This isn’t the blind leading the blind: it’s one blind person pushing another off a cliff. I’ve seen this happen again and again in writers’ groups, and it ticks me off.
The first thing I’ve learned from the previous exercise [insert link here!] is that I am comfortable writing very long sentences. I learned some principles for writing them as well: use semicolons when you have to, but avoid them if you can; insert various kinds of parentheticals that enrich the simple line; make sure that the sentence has a singular overall arc that could be stripped out; at the very end, go back to your semicolons and see if you can’t work around them, and if you can’t, they probably ought to be periods.
The second thing I’ve learned from the exercise is that 7 words is a kind of cutoff. You can fake decent prose with a higher limit; once you’re cut down to 7, it just sucks. Everything is sacrificed before almighty Brevity.
I have also learned, incidentally, that the Associated Press (these are the “journalists with their weird rules of writing” to whom Le Guin refers) says American readers find sentences over 20 words confusing and difficult. Questions:
How many? About 65%
How did you establish this? Unknown
How much education do those 65% have, and do they read anything like what I want to write? Unknown
My takeaway: a lot of people out there wouldn’t know a graceful sentence if it punched them in the face, but I don’t have any particular reason to think they’d want to be my readers even if I wrote only See Spot run.
So if you’re a writer, and you’re aware of this “fact”, what do you do with it?
I say that you ought to take it into account as you write and revise. Could this sentence be shorter? Would it lose anything important if it were? Would the paragraph lose anything valuable? Would the sentence gain force or clarity or vibrancy? Consider all this, and then make an informed decision.
For example:
Joe was walking down the road, watching the girls who were bicycling along the road and thinking they were pretty hot.
[21 words; should it be? What do all those progressives / continuatives do? Is this immediately followed by a stark, sharp event? If not, should these things be progressive?]
As Joe walked down the road, he watched the girls on bicycles. He thought they were pretty hot. [12 + 6]
This is pretty good, actually. Clean, simple, effective. No waste.
You could get rid of the “to be”—“He thought them pretty hot”—but that feels like a contrast to simple Joe thinking simply.
You could get rid of the weak adverb—“He thought they were hot”—but now the rhythm of each piece is getting dangerously similar: Joe walked, he watched, he thought, they were hot. If you like it, it’s okay, because “As Joe walked” is quite a different pattern, but the echo isn’t great to my ear. I want to break that with the adverb “pretty.” In addition, that adverb points strongly to a POV: this isn’t some external narrator speaking, it’s a 3d-person expression of how Joe thinks.
The thing is, these two sentences can’t be entirely representative of the narration, because while it works for two sentences, by the time I reach 10 it’s going to be clunky, back on the cogwheel railroad going clunk clunk clunk.
One more time, with feeling:
Joe was walking down the road, watching some girls bicycling along the same road and thinking they were pretty hot. He was so engrossed in the girls’ legs that he actually bumped into Fred and had to pretend he’d been cleaning his glasses.
Suddenly this is completely different. It’s not wonderful prose or anything, but now all that progressive stuff has a purpose, we’ve got a feel for Joe, and we’re moving into what the scene or incident is really about. 2 sentences, 20+23, and I say it’s not bad at all, and certainly not unclear or difficult to read.
/rant-off/
Proposed exercise:
Take a mid-length paragraph (5-10 sentences, 100 words or so) of narrative prose, and re-break the sentences, making whatever small syntactical changes are necessary to avoid errors. Strive to make as few changes as possible.
First, cut it into short sentences, no more than 15 words, averaging under 10. No fragments!
Second, stretch it into as few sentences as possible without a total rewrite.
Third, re-break the sentences to give a distinct narrative voice, attempting, insofar as possible without totally rewriting, to convey a significantly different narrative voice than the original.
Proposed variant:
Do this exercise with at least two paragraphs, one excellent and one mediocre or worse.
For consideration: Could you get the excellent paragraph to restructure with the new voice, and insofar as you could, what was gained and lost? When you restructured the mediocre paragraph, did it get better, and how?
I think I’m going to try this for the next blog entry.