This article originally appeared in the first print issue of Works in Progress, Issue 21. The last possible date to get this issue in print is Thursday 18 December. If you miss that cut-off date, your first issue will be Issue 22 in January.
‘A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.’ VS Naipaul’s first rule for good writing is a popular one. From Hemingway’s legion of admirers, to Grammarly, to countless books and internet memes about writing well, the idea that shorter sentences are better is dominant. Many people go further, arguing that one of the most important changes in English over time is its sentences getting shorter.
This has been a standard modern academic account of English prose, from Edwin H Lewis’s 1894 book The History of the English Paragraph to recent dataset analyses. Arjun Panickssery recently argued that English sentences got shorter over time and that ‘shorter sentences reflect better writing’.
The Elizabethans and Victorians wrote long tangled sentences that resembled the briars growing underneath Sleeping Beauty’s tower. Today we write like Hemingway. Short. Sharp. Readable. Pick up an old book and the sentences roll on. Go to the office, read the paper, or scroll Twitter and they do not. So it is said. I would like to suggest that this account is incomplete.
I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modeled more closely on spoken English.
What this should demonstrate is that shortness is the wrong dimension to investigate. We think we are looking at a language that got simpler; in fact we are looking at one that has created huge variation in what it can express and how, by adding new ways of writing. Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them.
What is a sentence?
We often talk as though a sentence is just the words and characters between two full stops (periods). But when grammarians refer to a ‘sentence’ they mean something with a certain structure of ‘syntax’. By this way of thinking, a sentence is an independent clause, also known as a main clause. A main clause has a subject and a predicate. The subject is the thing performing the action. The predicate is the verb (the action) and the object (the thing receiving the action).
Instead of:
Man dog walk. Boy biscuit eat. Girl throw ball.
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