Building Great Sentences Read Online Free PDF Page A

are more effective than those that convey less. Sentences that anticipate and answer more questions that a reader might have are better than those that answer fewer questions. Sentences that bring ideas and images into clearer focus by adding more useful details and explanation are generally more effective than those that are less clearly focused and that offer fewer details. In practice, this means that I generally value longer sentences over shorter sentences, as long as the length accomplishes some of those important goals I’ve just mentioned.
    Many of us have been exposed over the years to the idea that effective writing is
simple and direct
, a term generally associated with Strunk and White’s legendary guidebook,
The Elements of Style
. Or we remember some of the slogans from that book, such as “Omit needless words.” Unfortunately, it’s a lot harder for us to remember that Strunk concluded his discussion of the mandate to omit needless words with this all-important qualifier: “This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or that he avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” Strunk’s concern is specifically with words and phrases that do not add propositions to the sentence, phrases like “the reason why is that” used in place of “because,” or “owing to the fact that” in place of “since.” It’s far easier to remember the term
simple and direct
as a summary of Jacques Barzun’s advice in his
Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers
than it is to remember that simple does not mean simplistic, direct does not mean short, and simple and direct does not mean that we should all write like Ernest Hemingway in a hurry.
    I like Faulkner as well as I like Hemingway, and I’d like to believe that even William Strunk and certainly E. B. White would not have tried to edit Faulkner out of existence. When Hemingway writes “He disliked bars and bodegas,” speaking of an old waiter in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” few of us would argue that his sentence is not simple and direct or that it is cluttered with needless words. But when Faulkner writes about the boy who’s the protagonist in “Barn Burning” it’s hard to see how Strunk and White’s admonition might apply:
    The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish—this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of the blood.
    Simple and direct it most certainly is not. Both writers, Faulkner and Hemingway, introduce us to the thinking of their characters, but just as the thinking of Hemingway’s old waiter is infinitely more tired and less active than the thinking of Faulkner’s boy, the sentence each writer constructs is intended to hit us in very different ways for very different reasons. Start cutting out words and simplifying the syntax in Faulkner’s sentence and we’ll miss the complex thinking that haunts the boy throughout the story.
    But even Hemingway, the poster boy for simple and direct, reminds us that a simple and direct sentence is not the same as one that is simplistic and short, as we can see from another, earlier sentence from “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”: “In the daytime, the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he