/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20059496]

How do you write long sentences? I can only write short sentences, if I try to write any longer my sentences look like shit.

[Anonymous No.20059595]

>>20059496
sentence diagramming. get into it

[Anonymous No.20059728]

>>20059496
i want to fuck and slap the shit out of her.
p s fcuk trannies!!!!!!

[Anonymous No.20059731]

>>20059496
looks like a guy in drag

[Anonymous No.20059760]

>>20059496
You might want to get acquainted with this bad boy

[Anonymous No.20059766]

Just use commas and stop caring about muh run-on sentences that only redditors cry about.

[Anonymous No.20059767]

>>20059496
Young minded beast, forward must you peril before you can understand once you understand all the rules of a written art, you can begin to deconstruct it into nothing but subjective scribbles, I come before you to tell you, you can do it if you put your mind into it, forgotten daydreams can weave fears into a noble shafting worker untying the knots done up by so many men and women, I come before you to tell you all you need to do is throw caution to the wayside and build your indestructible muscles of plunder and might, kill your darlings.

[Anonymouṡ No.20059783]

>>20059496
Read good authors who use long sentences.

Bearing in mind that average sentence length has declined 75% in the past few hundred years, this more-or-less translates to

READ OLD BOOKS

which you should be doing anyway.

[Anonymouṡ No.20059802]

>>20059783

An intriguing related issue:

Does anyone know of a big statistical analysis of sentence length for major authors? I had a quick search but didn't see anything. It ought to be fairly easy nowadays.

I might put a few novels through one of the online lexical analyzers and get a feel for the numbers.

[Anonymous No.20059889]

>>20059496
Who is she?
She looks like ecodex before the transition

[Anonymous No.20059992]

>>20059760
School is session: https://youtu.be/4AyjKgz9tKg

[Anonymous No.20059996]

>>20059992
It looks like you missed the class on prepositions.

[Anonymous No.20060100]

>>20059728
B A S E D
A
S
E
D

[Anonymous No.20060147]

>>20059496
When you are about to put a period, put a comma instead.

[Anonymous No.20060153]

>>20059496
semicolons and em-dashes, friend.

[Anonymous No.20060285]

>>20059496
Punt a comma or semicolon in there lmao

[Anonymous No.20060380]

>>20059496
Long sentences are bad. Prioritize flow, not output. In academic and legal writing, sentences lengthen as the writer anticipates questions, connections, and objections.

[Anonymous No.20060415]

I've been stuggling with the same issue, that is, when I find myself writing, I rarely, if ever, feel sure whether or not my sentences are long because I'm trying to covey a singular idea that necessitates a wordy sentence, or if I'm mistaken, and there is, in reality, a more concise way I could get my idea across.

Plainly...

Sometimes I use too many words in a sentence.

[Anonymous No.20060427]

That's not a necessarily a bad thing. If long sentences don't come to you naturally, then why not develop your short sentences to flow good together? Assuming you don't write in caveman speak.

[Anonymouṡ No.20061163]

Writing long sentences is easy; writing them well is much harder. You can't just string a lot of short sentences together. The end result has to feel like the most natural (or the only) way to express what was expressed. You have to pay attention not only to the sequence of thought, but the rhythm as well. A good test of this is writing long sentences without much punctuation.

Here's a 61-word Cormac McCarthy sentence with no interior punctuation at all. It's from the scene in The Crossing where Billy sees the primadonna bathing in the stream in the morning and suddenly realizes what life is all about:

She opened her eyes and saw him there on the bridge and she turned her back and walked slowly up out of the river and was lost to his view among the pale standing trunks of the cottonwoods and the sun rose and the river ran as before but nothing was the same nor did he think it ever would be.

McCarthy could have written

"...saw him there on the bridge. She turned her back..."

but the conjunction conveys the sense at Billy is holding his breath at that point.

Here's a 66-word no-punctuation sentence from a fun P.J.O'Rourke essay called Ferrari Refutes The Decline Of The West. I give the whole paragraph; the sentence in question is at the end.

We came by a 930 Turbo Porsche near the Talladega exit. He was going about ninety when we passed him, and he gave us a little bit of a run, passed us at about 110, and then we passed him again. He was as game as anybody we came across and was hanging right on our tail at 120. Ah, but then — then we just walked away from him. Five seconds and he was nothing but a bathtub-shaped dot in the mirrors. I suppose he could have kept up, but driving one of those ass-engined Nazi slot cars must be a task at around 225 percent of the speed limit. But not for us. I’ve got more vibration here on my electric typewriter than we had blasting into Birmingham that beautiful morning in that beautiful tour across this wonderful country from the towers of Manhattan to the bluffs of Topanga Canyon so fast we filled the appointment logs of optometrists’ offices in thirty cities just from people getting their eyes checked for seeing streaks because they watched us go by.

[Anonymous No.20061910]

>>20059496
I envy you, anon. Five years of studying philosophy has forever sealed any literary talent I ever possessed behind unnecessarily concrete and repetitive syntax. I've considered suicide, but student loans are not voided with death and I'd hate to beset my family with further troubles. And so I must continue my existence in the shadows fightened far from the light of literature; true literary freedom may grace then my industrial grave after I've sundered the chains of my sinful youth's shackle through years of the most dolor travail imaginable.

[Anonymouṡ No.20063383]

>>20061163

Cormac famously said that a well-written sentence needs little if any punctuation, and doesn't use semi-colons at all. He's right up to a point, but only up to a point. His sort of writing works well without semicolons, but there are other sorts of writing. Here's a famous long-ish (100 word) sentence which uses them to good effect. Committing it to memory will do no-one any harm:

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

[Anonymouṡ No.20063397]

>>20061163
Cormac famously said that a well-written sentence needs little punctuation. He's correct up to a point. His sort of writing works well with just the occasional comma. But there are other sorts of writing. Here's a famous long-ish (100 word) sentence which uses semi-colons to good effect. Committing it to memory will do no-one any harm:

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

[Anonymous No.20063563]

>>20061163
>>20063397
What do you think about Bernhard?

[Anonymous No.20063623]

You just layer in other shit. Expand.

A man kicks a ball.

A man, much older than everyone else there, kicks a ball.

A man, much older than everyone else there--and there were many there in the arena, being as this was such a rare event, the Eagles vs Snakes, their first match in twenty years--kicks a ball.

A man, much older than everyone else there--and there were many there in the arena, being as this was such a rare event: the Eagles vs Snakes, their first match in twenty years--completely grey on top, his skin thin but thick with moles and liver spots, and bones showing as though they would break through at any moment, kicks a ball.

A man, much older than everyone else there--and there were many there in the arena, being as this was such a rare event: the Eagles vs Snakes, their first match in twenty years--completely grey on top, his skin thin but thick with moles and liver spots, and bones showing as though they would break through at any moment (Dad! he could hear his daughter saying now as he approached the ball on the field, I can see every bone in your hand), kicks a ball.

[Anonymous No.20064140]

>>20059767
bro, their are bugs in your hair bro, roaches, little roaches, the type you see crawling out of storm drains and peeking from behind corners, they're everywhere

[Anonymouṡ No.20064273]

>>20063563
Thomas? Haven't read him.

[Anonymous No.20065406]

>>20059767
>woah if you take away the periods it looks like one long sentence
nice try retard this reads like shit.

[Anonymous No.20066317]

>>20059496
>have long idea
>write long sentence
>have short idea
>write short sentence
>have no ideas
>write a self-help book for young men