It’s interesting how more modern writers use much shorter sentences in their paragraphs. I’ve been reading novels from the early 1900’s and they have some of the longest run-on sentences I’ve ever seen
Adam Smith in the beginning of Wealth of Nations has looooooong sentences with tons of commas. I added the breaks, this is actually one paragraph:
Among the
savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to
work is more or less employed in useful labour, and endeavours to provide,
as well as he can, the necessaries and conveniencies of life, for himself,
and such of his family or tribe as are either too old, or too young, or
too infirm, to go a-hunting and fishing.
Such nations, however, are so
miserably poor, that, from mere want, they are frequently reduced, or at
least think themselves reduced, to the necessity sometimes of directly
destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people,
and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to
be devoured by wild beasts.
Among civilized and thriving nations, on the
contrary, though a great number of people do not labour at all, many of
whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times, more
labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the
whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly
supplied; and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is
frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and
conveniencies of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.
“The savage societies are sometimes reduced by shortage to leaving people to die, unlike our enlightened land of plenty where leaving people to die is standard procedure”
Run on sentences area awesome. For twelve years my teachers told me not to use them but I defied them all and continue to string together sentences with the wrong uhh… mark thingies to this day!
I don’t think there’s any legal system in the world where “no normal human being would ever guess that’s against the law and I had no idea” is a defense.
I hate long sentences; they make me angry… were I to purge one group of people in my socialist utopia, it would be those pretentious, self-appointed guardians of whatever outdated “style book” first instilled into the eager mind of an innocent child the notion that communicating in emojis (noble word! ) was unacceptable, and who like the Old Testament serpent feed to their sycophantic followers the old lie – what lie, you ask; well, the lie that if you but speak intelligently, you will be as gods, that if you eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Case Endings and Suburdinate Clauses, you shall know both good and evil, and your writing will be immortal; that if you stop using verbalizations like “lmao” and “skibidi” and “many such cases,” people will respect you and love you and worship you all your days, for you now see things sub specie aeternitatis (more like sub specie LOL); and that generally, you have performed a sort of discipline for the mind analagous to cleansing the body in a shower-bath, which latter is obviously a bourgeoise and counter-revolutionary act. I hate tankies so fucking much.
There was some book I had to read over the summer in preparation for AP English my senior year of high school, and it was all just page length stacks of nested clauses where it would just stop in the middle of a sentence, elaborate on some aspect of it, interrupt to elaborate - at least once, usually more - some more, then continue to keep doing this out to an absurd depth, only to meander back to it most of a page later and then either finish it or start another pile of nested clauses. Like look at how I structured that sentence and imagine something ten times worse, and then imagine it happening at least once in every single paragraph and at least once per page.
Also the story was awful in its own right, terrible prose aside. All I can remember of the plot was that the POV character was a dumbass and killed someone by being a dumbass and it all hinged entirely on inscrutable 19th century superstitious sensibilities.
At the end of the year I gave the book to a junior in one of my classes who was going to take AP English the next year and who had to read that same story over the summer.
The book itself was a modern reprint, and one of the larger paperback sizes - maybe 10" or so, whatever the specific standard size around that is - so the font wasn’t particularly small so much as there was a lot on each page. I got it at a used bookstore, and IIRC what I managed to find specifically was an anthological collection of the author’s work which happened to include the novella I actually needed to read.
I think a part of it is the homogenisation of the industry. People tend to write novels that publishers want to publish, and a part of that involves doing what is thought to make people more likely to read, like starting off with a hook and shorter, more direct sentences. A novel is a product first and foremost these days, not something someone writes solely as a creative endeavor.
I’ve been reading Tanith Lee books recently and really enjoying them, and read that her career was pretty emblematic of this.
She wrote weird fiction. Fantasy, scifi, horror, thrillers, etc. She hopped from genre to genre and would write books that had a very ambiguous genre (if a story is scary and has the story beats of a horror novel but it takes place in a traditional sword and sorcery setting is it horror or fantasy? Or both? I think Tanith Lee found this question very tedious.). In the 70s and 80s she was writing an absurd number of books and getting them published, but in the 90s paper became much more expensive and as this reduced the profit margins on books and increased number of copies sold to be profitable she started to get more and more pushed out of traditional publishing.
Nobody wanted to publish a ton from an author who wouldn’t stay in one lane to build a dedicated fanbase of “fantasy fans” or “horror readers” and they definitely didn’t want to risk selling a fantasy novel that wasn’t clearly a fantasy novel. She got a bit published during this time but mostly her rejected manuscripts just piled up. It’s not even that her books hadn’t been profitable, they’re just didn’t fit into the neat categories that publishers now wanted. Blacklisted due to falling just outside of risk management guidelines for writing books that people would just call “dark fantasy” now probably.
It’s interesting how more modern writers use much shorter sentences in their paragraphs. I’ve been reading novels from the early 1900’s and they have some of the longest run-on sentences I’ve ever seen
Adam Smith in the beginning of Wealth of Nations has looooooong sentences with tons of commas. I added the breaks, this is actually one paragraph:
“The savage societies are sometimes reduced by shortage to leaving people to die, unlike our enlightened land of plenty where leaving people to die is standard procedure”
I write like this
Run on sentences area awesome. For twelve years my teachers told me not to use them but I defied them all and continue to string together sentences with the wrong uhh… mark thingies to this day!
You have to know the rules in order, perchance, to break them.
I don’t think there’s any legal system in the world where “no normal human being would ever guess that’s against the law and I had no idea” is a defense.
Reading fucking Dostoevsky and there are almost as many subordinate clauses per sentence as there are nicknames for the characters.
I hate long sentences; they make me angry… were I to purge one group of people in my socialist utopia, it would be those pretentious, self-appointed guardians of whatever outdated “style book” first instilled into the eager mind of an innocent child the notion that communicating in emojis (noble word! ) was unacceptable, and who like the Old Testament serpent feed to their sycophantic followers the old lie – what lie, you ask; well, the lie that if you but speak intelligently, you will be as gods, that if you eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Case Endings and Suburdinate Clauses, you shall know both good and evil, and your writing will be immortal; that if you stop using verbalizations like “lmao” and “skibidi” and “many such cases,” people will respect you and love you and worship you all your days, for you now see things sub specie aeternitatis (more like sub specie LOL); and that generally, you have performed a sort of discipline for the mind analagous to cleansing the body in a shower-bath, which latter is obviously a bourgeoise and counter-revolutionary act. I hate tankies so fucking much.
There was some book I had to read over the summer in preparation for AP English my senior year of high school, and it was all just page length stacks of nested clauses where it would just stop in the middle of a sentence, elaborate on some aspect of it, interrupt to elaborate - at least once, usually more - some more, then continue to keep doing this out to an absurd depth, only to meander back to it most of a page later and then either finish it or start another pile of nested clauses. Like look at how I structured that sentence and imagine something ten times worse, and then imagine it happening at least once in every single paragraph and at least once per page.
Also the story was awful in its own right, terrible prose aside. All I can remember of the plot was that the POV character was a dumbass and killed someone by being a dumbass and it all hinged entirely on inscrutable 19th century superstitious sensibilities.
At the end of the year I gave the book to a junior in one of my classes who was going to take AP English the next year and who had to read that same story over the summer.
God yes pump it directly in to my prefrontal cortex.
Literally how I write. The run on sentence is my kingdom and each semicolon and parentheses a province.
Did it have the tiny font too? That’s another thing about those older books is how small the font is.
The book itself was a modern reprint, and one of the larger paperback sizes - maybe 10" or so, whatever the specific standard size around that is - so the font wasn’t particularly small so much as there was a lot on each page. I got it at a used bookstore, and IIRC what I managed to find specifically was an anthological collection of the author’s work which happened to include the novella I actually needed to read.
I think a part of it is the homogenisation of the industry. People tend to write novels that publishers want to publish, and a part of that involves doing what is thought to make people more likely to read, like starting off with a hook and shorter, more direct sentences. A novel is a product first and foremost these days, not something someone writes solely as a creative endeavor.
I’ve been reading Tanith Lee books recently and really enjoying them, and read that her career was pretty emblematic of this.
She wrote weird fiction. Fantasy, scifi, horror, thrillers, etc. She hopped from genre to genre and would write books that had a very ambiguous genre (if a story is scary and has the story beats of a horror novel but it takes place in a traditional sword and sorcery setting is it horror or fantasy? Or both? I think Tanith Lee found this question very tedious.). In the 70s and 80s she was writing an absurd number of books and getting them published, but in the 90s paper became much more expensive and as this reduced the profit margins on books and increased number of copies sold to be profitable she started to get more and more pushed out of traditional publishing.
Nobody wanted to publish a ton from an author who wouldn’t stay in one lane to build a dedicated fanbase of “fantasy fans” or “horror readers” and they definitely didn’t want to risk selling a fantasy novel that wasn’t clearly a fantasy novel. She got a bit published during this time but mostly her rejected manuscripts just piled up. It’s not even that her books hadn’t been profitable, they’re just didn’t fit into the neat categories that publishers now wanted. Blacklisted due to falling just outside of risk management guidelines for writing books that people would just call “dark fantasy” now probably.