There is some discourse going around my corners of the Internet lately, originating from this LessWrong post about the lengths of sentences in written works of fiction decreasing over time from nearly fifty to a perhaps unfair but poignant twelve in recent publication such as the Harry Potter books. The bulk of the change happens before the 20th century, so this is not an internet phenomenon, and it does span the time our society transitioned from an oral to a written culture and the advent of silent reading.
I spent most of yesterday in bookstores with this discourse in mind and it was immediately obvious that something was going on. I don’t know about the overall trend, but I can certainly trace something in either the styles for writing over my lifetime, or the selection bias that determines what books are kept, or at least what sort of readers keep books.
The sentence lengths were striking: fully 2/3 of the books were simple sentences, nearly entirely. Not a complex or compound sentence among most pages, and while here and there maybe a compound one, and maybe extremely rarely a complex one, never complex-compound. It varies by genre just how profound the effect is, and certainly the science fiction shelf is one of the worst this way, but everything is very much written simply. Sentences begin with conjunctions on nearly every page instead of the complex sentences, and ‘but’ and ‘and’ the only conjunctions used. “While” I know is derided by the ‘writing 101’ advice that litters the internet, but there’s not an until or unless or even an if in most of it. The subjunctive mood is almost entirely absent from most texts in science fiction and fantasy, and in anything we’d call a “plot driven” book, however much as a writer I detest the oversimplification that label brings.
Pop into any bookstore, in most books, and you will find short sentences, many starting with ‘And’ or ‘But’. Find a Booker Prize winner or translated work, and you will not find this to be the case. Even more striking to me though was when I ran into a used bookstore: even the pulpiest science fiction novels were much more richly structured. Star Trek and Star Wars novels, the sort churned out by the dozens in the 80’s and early 90’s, and even the rather obviously early examples of cheap independently published books telling the story of an AD&D game, marketable only to its tiny readership because of Leisure-Suit-Larry-quality sex jokes, had more in-depth sentence structures, too.
I do wonder if this is the metastasized result of writing advice that advocates paring each sentence to the bone and beyond, leaving the writer, as E. B. White said, “seemed in the position of having shortchanged himself”. (It is not lost on me that one of the examples in the LessWrong post is Stewart Little, written by that E. B. White, the same White of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style where the advice to shortchange oneself originated.)
Certainly for academic text, known for its run-on wordiness and circumlocution in lieu of getting to the point could use such a tightly-wielded scalpel, and the entire genre of “literary fiction”, if one dares call it that, is written with prose that if not purple, yields a rather deep lavender hue and might take this advice but it has become pervasive, not a suggestion for improvement of a specific failing of a specific sort of writer, but an absolute rule from which one must not deviate. Modern writing tools such as Harper issue warnings when sentences reach forty words. While the run-on sentence is a grammatical hazard best avoided, the contrasts of complex-compound sentences and the layered texture they bring is not easily replaced by simple statements in rapid succession, as is the style of modern fiction.
Not unrelated is the tendency for modern fiction to be written with a style that emphasizes immediacy of experience, rather than any sort of context: first person narration, invisible narrators, and tight focus on single characters point of view are pervasive in advice for writers of all levels of experience, as a rule that only the most sophisticated might break with impunity. I do wonder if editors and the commercial fiction presses have set up a feedback loop that creates an ever-shrinking expectation of simplification.
That said, I do not think this is a moral quandary. Ninety percent of everything has always been crap, and there is no shortage of lyrical writers with fantastic sentences, and we’d do well to encourage others to take the time to really read and take time with the written word and enjoy the prose, and at the same time remind ourselves that it’s okay for stories to be fun. We can, time and time again, look to see what has been discarded by the meat-grinder of commerce, dust it off, give it fresh paint, and include it in the next submissions. The consolidation of the publishing industry is not contingent on the length of sentences in the books printed. We are still capable of lyrical complexity, even if it is out of fashion. Fashion will careen back and forth as it always does.