In Defense of the Long Sentence

Every writing tool on the internet seems to have the same primary directive: make it shorter. Hemingway is held up as the ultimate ideal, while the winding, digressive, clause-heavy sentences of a writer like Proust or Virginia Woolf are treated as structural failures.

We are told that online readers have short attention spans. We are told to keep our sentences under twenty words. We are told to write at a fifth-grade reading level to maximize our reach.

But what are we losing when we chop every thought into bite-sized, digestible pieces?

A long sentence is a journey. It allows the writer to hold multiple conflicting ideas in suspension, to qualify a statement before it lands, to build a rhythm that crescendos over the span of a paragraph. A long sentence demands something of the reader; it requires them to hold their breath and follow the thread through a labyrinth of commas and semicolons.

When we mandate brevity, we mandate simplicity. Some thoughts are inherently complex, nuanced, and contradictory. They cannot be expressed in ten words. They require the sprawling architecture of a long sentence to be fully articulated. Let us not sacrifice the depth of our thought on the altar of the readability score.