Sentences can be large, they can contain multitudes—but not literary litter.
When we were young we learned that a sentence is a complete thought. A thought can be long, sinuous, complex, challenging and more. Geist editors love long sentences; we even teach people how to write them. But everything in the sentence has to fit with everything else, and the bits have to be written and arranged to make music.
Here’s a great one, written about an event in 1968:
“The Beverly Hills Eugene’s, not unlike Senator McCarthy’s campaign itself, had a certain déjà vu aspect to it, a glow of 1952 humanism: there were Ben Shahn posters on the walls, and the gesture toward a strobe light was nothing that might interfere with ‘good talk,’ and the music was not 1968 rock but the kind of jazz people used to have on their record players when everyone who believed in the Family of Man bought Scandinavian stainless-steel flatware and voted for Adlai Stevenson.” —from “Good Citizens,” in The White Album by Joan Didion
This sentence evokes fully a time, place and consciousness. Everything in it belongs to the thought and carries the reader along.
Here’s a sentence that we made up, but it is built like many sentences we see in the news and in articles and books:
“Born in Venezuela, he had red hair, moving to Manhattan when he was a teenager and dying at age seventy-eight while climbing in the Andes.”
This sentence, in contrast to Didion’s elegant mansion above, is a crude, hastily built storage hall jammed with miscellaneous objects that may or may not be needed again. The sentence is not beautiful; it is not even functional.
Here's another one, taken from Wikipedia:
“Arriving in Paris in 1973, Huston obtained a Master's Degree from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, writing a thesis on swear words under the supervision of Roland Barthes.”
Oh, dear.
Don’t cram expositional data into your sentences, hoping that it won’t show. It will.
For another deluxe long sentence, see “Sentences: Long is beautiful,” in our Writer's Toolbox.
