Sentence Length

My dad has a memorable poster in his bathroom: a diagram of a ridiculously long sentence by Marcel Proust. It’s from his masterpiece, "À la recherche du temps perdu ("Remembrance of Things Past," also translated as "In Search of Lost Time"), and it starts like this: 

“Their honor precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable....” 

Blah, blah, blah. I’ve examined it numerous times over the last two decades, but I’ve yet to finish wading through all 958 words. At 150 words longer than this entire column, the sentence is just unreadable. Believe me, I’ve tried to stick with it till the end, but it’s impossible.

Sentence fragments

I have to applaud Proust for being able to keep everything straight in that sentence—because he sure used a lot of semicolons, commas, clauses, and other tricks to lengthen it. I guess French literary geniuses didn’t take advantage of copy editors back then. 

Well, I’m going to suck it up and be the first to trim that monstrous sentence. Here we go. “Their honor precarious, their sentence too long.” [Period.] Oh no! Now my honor is precarious. My crime has been discovered: Those seven words are an incomplete sentence, also known as a sentence fragment. It has no verb. Do you think Proust ever wrote one of those? Nah. Bet not.

All this Proust talk is making me hungry for a madeleine, a small shell-shaped cake that had a starring role in "In Search of Lost Time." I think we should go in search of the perfect length for a sentence. The long and the short of it is this: If you stuff in too many things, you’ll get an overly long sentence; if you leave out a subject, verb, or necessary object, you’ll be stuck with a fragment.

The best way to cut down a long sentence is to figure out your main points.

Finding the proper length

Proust’s enormous sentence is an anomaly, but long sentences certainly haven’t disappeared. These days, plenty of meandering sentences roam through manuscripts. These behemoths suffer from too many "which," "...

Keep reading on Quick and Dirty Tips