I want to thank the person who recommended Building Great Sentences: How to write the kind of sentences you love to read by Brooks Landon, not because I have much positive to say about it but because now I know who to blame for a lot of copy editors’ bald spots where they’ve ripped out their hair.
I checked the copyright date to see if I should be extending the same “product of a different era” leeway I grant Dwight Swain. Alas, it’s a product of 2013, no indication it’s a reprint from 1965. The focus on writing and the teaching thereof from bygone eras may contribute to the dated feeling. Landon claims there are “few contemporary and effective examples,” either oblivious to the existence of pop fiction or all too aware examples abound in books his academic peers consider trash, which would reflect poorly on his premise that rambling sentences are a stamp of literary merit.
I’ll give you the warning no one gave me: Despite the economical “Jesus wept” referenced in the jacket copy, this is 288 pages about one type of sentence, the cumulative variety, constructed by cramming more and more and MORE words between the initial capital letter and the period until meaning is crushed by unfocused bloat.
Of course it’s possible to construct a good cumulative sentence! Start with a broad concept and twist it into tighter and tighter detail until it becomes a needle-sharp point at the end. The examples plucked from the far distant past demonstrate this; the examples written by the person ostensibly teaching how to write such sentences do not.
What this book might instead teach you to build:
- Time Travel sentences, in which events are reported out of chronological order (They slept, having finally found a campsite, sheltered from the freezing rain) and with the stimulus after the response (The girl jumped up from her desk, startled by the bell). Many chapters later, Landon writes: “Accordingly, we need to be sure that our coordinate cumulative modifiers always make sense in the order we place them, honoring progressions or sequences in time and space, their order tracking through time, … cause before effect, tying agent to action.” (I elided “large to small, right to left” because those are generally flexible arrangements that I presume were added only to make the sentence longer.) The bare minimum requirement for writing instruction should be practicing what you preach within the instruction.
- Sentences without focus. The girl raised the flag, a triumphant grin on her face, the flag’s green striped fabric tattered and torn by bullets, her bravery an inspiration to her compatriots. What is that, Omniscient ADHD point of view? Look at the girl, look at the flag, look back at the girl, look back at the flag, BULLETS, she’s so inspiring, she must use Old Spice, I’m on a horse. More words should be used to bring the point of interest into sharper focus or illuminate its position in a broader context, not fling the reader’s attention all over the place.
- Sentences that Tell, Then Show. The abundance of “so-and-so was [abstraction]” (he was afraid; she was proud) is particularly egregious in this book because the sprawling sentences then go on to elaborate about the abstraction, either using or suggesting much stronger verbs than “was.” It’s not this book’s stated mission to correct every bad habit, but must it promote so many of them?
- Written writing fit for the Department of Redundancy Department. Some of this stems from telling and then also showing (He was afraid, fearing that he would never find her), but it’s also openly encouraged in the name of “repetition.” Repetition is a great tool when you want to punch readers in the face with a point, but this book advocates repetition just for the sake of it. While reading one example Landon “loves,” I muttered over it, “Oh, right. The poison. The poison for Kuzco, the poison chosen especially to kill Kuzco, Kuzco’s poison. That poison?” If you’re writing comedy, this may be amazing advice; Landon notes you may also recognize this pattern from “the insistent repetition favored in political rhetoric,” which obviously everyone should seek to emulate in their writing because it’s so authentic and enjoyable to read.
Chapter 14 is one big defense of long sentences, which the author of a book devoted to long sentences insists have been unjustly maligned. (In fact, “defensive” is how I’d describe the overall tone. Reading between the lines, I’d say lack of clarity has been justly maligned and someone’s being deliberately obtuse about that criticism because length is easier to defend than incoherence. No one criticizes a sentence because it exceeds a word count limit. They criticize because it’s boring, confusing, clunky, incongruously paced—problems of language, not numbers. No one counts the words in a good sentence unless the number itself is of academic interest.) Landon concedes some long sentences are bad, then states, “These sentences are bad mostly because of what goes into them, not because of how much there is.” There is no explanation in this book of how to choose quality content for long sentences.
There is, indeed, a lot of encouragement for padding. Chapter 11 includes a multi-page list of phatic utterances (words that serve no purpose other than “breaking silence” and are “content-free,” per the author’s own admission), such as: as it happens, in point of fact, for that matter, you know, amazingly enough, as everybody knows, first of all, let me tell you. Have you ever noticed stuff you read on the web is peppered with such filler, to the extent it’s instantly recognizable as the Web Content genre? That’s the result of search engine optimization, which calls them “transition words” and penalizes writers with poor search ranking for not bloating posts with them. Here, you’re encouraged to use this “content-free” filler in all your prose to make longer sentences, only to be told later the reason bad long sentences are bad is that they’re full of the kind of junk you were instructed to add 3 chapters ago. Logical consistency is the mind killer!
Y’all know I love a long sentence packed with asides, digressions, parentheticals, and qualifiers. According to my word processor, the maximum words per sentence in ToCS is 103 (the average a mere 15). Even when blogging, I routinely ignore the “64% of your sentences are longer than 20 words; the maximum is 25%” SEO flag because my sentences are as long as they need to be, dammit. But shoehorning words into a sentence as if there’s a period shortage and you get only one to communicate 50 pieces of information does not sharpen the point nor improve clarity. If readers can’t remember what the sentence is about by the time they reach the end of it (or were never able to scoop its “about” from the flood of words), you’ve lost meaning, not added it.
Landon writes in Chapter 2 (emphasis his), “… in many cases, we need to add words to improve our writing.” I wholeheartedly agree on this one point! But those added words don’t all have to be in the same sentence. Sometimes an idea deserves its own sentence. Sometimes expansion requires a paragraph. Sometimes information should be scattered fore and aft rather than dumped at the current insertion point.
Since an actual person recommended this book, we can chalk up some of my dislike to differing stylistic preferences. We might also call out the philosophical difference between writing as a masturbatory exercise (“but clarity stifles my style!”) and writing that takes a recipient’s experience into consideration (“sit back and enjoy not having to decipher word salad masquerading as ‘style'”). However, the subtitle (How to write the kind of sentences you love to read) misleads, regardless of taste. There’s only one type of sentence in this book, not plural; according to the author, that type of sentence is the object of little love; and if you follow the instruction provided in this book, you’ll be no closer to writing that one type of sentence well when you reach the end because the quality of a sentence lies in its content, which the book makes no attempt to address… except when it actively undermines quality of content by advocating use of filler, redundancy, and disorder.