Apparently authors are supposed to mix short and long sentences to captivate the audience.
Recently, a writing tool accused me that I don’t…
In my defence, it’s taken me more than three decades to cease writing immense paragraphs of cumulative sentences; with sub-sub-clauses – and a bewildering array of punctuation!
Goshdarnit. Backsliding again.
This is the damaging consequence of an entire degree course of eighteenth and nineteenth century novels.
The Changing Face of Mediocrity
Victorian writers: “He was, in the way of most men, possessed of a rudimentary intelligence, his countenance ordinary, his bearing mild, with some weakness about the shoulders, his hair the color of ash; he spoke of the weather.”
Normal people: “I met this guy, he was average.”
(Amber Sparks)
No question, the Victorians loved to write. Extensively. Expansively. At great length. Thomas Hardy’s greatest fault? Not knowing when to stop. Dickens got paid by the word for his serialised fiction. He could spin out a sentence to four or five lines. But not every book ran as long as the court case in Bleak House. Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities are short. Dickens wrote surprisingly modern, punchy dialogue, between long, evocative descriptions.
You don’t have to ‘write long to write literary.’
Variety Pack
To keep your readers’ attention, use a variety of sentence lengths: some short and punchy, others long and flowing. If every sentence in your document is the same length, your reader will be bored. (ProWritingAid)
It’s kind of obvious. Mix short and long sentences. Simple.
There’s a reason why children love Doctor Seuss and adults don’t. Short, simple sentences; rhymes; alliteration. Easy to read, but not much variety. Whereas Thomas Hardy can cure my insomnia using one sentence longer than the train journey from Peterborough to Crewe.
Variety is the spice of life and prose.
Which is why writing tools such as ProWiritingAid are so useful…
Bad Report
My most recent report card from ProWritingAid:
Warning: Sentence length 7
Use a few longer sentences to add more depth to your writing.
Hemingway would have loved the insight.
This hurts because I’m making a special effort to write shorter sentences. I still don’t know if I’m writing adult or YA. Slight problem there. But in either case, the current trend for mass market fiction is aim broad, aim low. Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.
Custodial Sentence
ProWritingAid’s Sentence Length Report tracks the variety in sentence lengths in your prose; the average sentence length, and how many long sentences you have. You can have a graph as a visual representation of the length of your sentences, because… technology.
The Sentence Length Report gives you three scores:
Sentence Variety Score
The sentence variety score is calculated using standard deviation, a mathematical measure against the average. The higher the standard deviation, the more your sentence lengths vary within the document.
Average Sentence Length
For most published writers, the average sentence length is between 11 and 18 words. If your average is above 18, then your writing might be too verbose or difficult. If your average is below 11, your writing may be choppy and fragmentary.
Individual Sentence Length
It will breakdown sentence length throughout your document; the graph highlights sections of the text that require more variety.
Don’t Judge Me
Taking sentence length as a single measure doesn’t provide a full picture. There’s also the Readability Grade and the Sentence Variety reports. ProWritingAid suggests you run the tool against short sections of text. But chapter by chapter,even scene by scene, it does weird things with the standard deviation. So I fed it a whole novel, which it didn’t really like. But I did get a much better overall set of results. I fed it individual chapters, excluding the flash-forward and flashback mini-chapters. Using my ‘average’ chapters, all my scores went up.
Average Sentence Length 12.4; target 11 to 18.
Take the sentence variety for a representative chapter. Under 10 words: 14. 10-19 words: 25. 20-29 words: 3. Readability grade: 7. Apparently the average adult reads at a 7th to 8th grade reading level (12-14 years old).
Suddenly I’m within the nominal range.
The Mean Average
The problem with the tool? It measures against an average. And we all know, averages are kind of… average.
My prose immediately butts against the average. I don’t include a lot of description in my text. The plot is action-oriented; I try to maintain a fast pace. My dialogue is naturalistic, between characters who are cagey, withdrawn, traumatised, from different social backgrounds, with little formal education. That adds up to a LOT of short sentences. That doesn’t make them boring or lacking variety. They are in keeping with the style, tone and genre of the novel.
So beating me with the mean average is a little, er, mean…
The defence rests, your honour.
Short sentences have punch and add emphasize to important points.
The loinger the sentence, the higher the reading grade. Long adds difficulty. Use wisely.
Variation is good.
Where does this sit with your cumulative sentence?
https://robincatling.com/introducing-the-cumulative-sentence
Somewhere in the middle. A cumulative sentence starts short and grows longer, step by step. Too obvious? I can just as easily overdo the cumulative sentence until it becomes monotonous and boring, same as everything else.