Every sentence is a story
A professor at a graduate writing program was once asked about the difficulty of choosing the handful of applicants who would be admitted that year.
“It’s not hard,” she said. “It doesn’t take long to see if someone grasps the English language.” When pressed about exactly how long it took, she shrugged and said, “One sentence.”
Harsh, maybe—but not wrong. You could argue that writing professors are especially attuned to the nuances of composition. But it’s a good policy to assume your audience is impatient. Sometimes it takes as little as one sentence for your audience to know if you’re telling the kind of story they want to hear.
If you want to brush up on your sentences—to make them clearer, more concise, and more readable—a great resource is the official Plain Language website of the United States government. The online resource is full of examples and guidelines that have applied to all US government communication since 2010, when the Obama Administration passed the Plain Writing Act. Its purpose is to “make it easier for the public to read, understand, and use government communications”—a noble goal, and a useful resource if you need to write stories in language that is clear, precise, and not too fancy.
Rule out ambiguity
Read the following sentence and see if you can catch a problem: This rule proposes the Spring/Summer subsistence harvest regulations in Alaska for migratory birds that expire on August 31, 2003.
Did you catch it? The above sentence is about birds who die at the end of August.
The revision below splits the original sentence in two, making it clear exactly what’s happening:
This rule proposes the Spring/Summer subsistence harvest regulations for migratory birds in Alaska. The regulations will expire on August 31, 2003.
Cure wordiness
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. ”
Take a deep breath and try reading this next sentence:
When the process of freeing a vehicle that has been stuck results in ruts or holes, the operator will fill the rut or hole created by such activity before removing the vehicle from the immediate area.
You probably understand what this sentence means, but it’s a mouthful. Here’s a version that retains the original meaning—with half the words.
If you make a hole while freeing a stuck vehicle, you must fill the hole before you drive away.
Sentence length has a profound effect on comprehension. According to a study by the American Press Institute, readers understand sentences best at 8 words or fewer. At 14 words, average comprehension drops to 90%. At 43 words, the figure plummets to below 10%.
Quantify readability
Even short sentences can often be made shorter:
The application must be completed by the applicant and received by the financial office by June 1st.
Change from passive voice to active voice, remove unnecessary information, and voilà:
We must receive your application by June 1st.
Of course, sometimes long sentences are simply fun to read (and to write). If you don’t vary your sentence length, you risk boring your audience. This appetite for variety and surprise can be taken to extremes, with surprising results. Take the opening two sentences of Wolfgang Koeppen’s Youth, translated brilliantly by Michael Hofmann. The first sentence is My mother was afraid of snakes. And the second?
On warm summer days, we walked through the brackish Rosental, the valley regularly flooded by storm tides, to see the house, Ephraimshagen, with its impenetrable whitewashed walls, its Junker-esque avenue of trees, its pilastered doorway of Prusso-Doric plainness, the crumbling, sorry, sandstone blitheness showing the ravages of time as much as the scytheman's hour-glass, the fatuous aspiration to mastery of the main house, its unoverturned hegemony over the peasantry, the old reserve-master-of-horse imposingness of the stables, the black and white striped flagstaff and its pan-German dreams hanging at half-mast; a cock crowed on the dung heap, milk soured in swollen udders, it was a short skip from procreation to slaughter, spirits reeked in the distillery vats, the opened windows yawned in the noonday sun, starched blinds blew white, the foxy red Pomeranian Biedermeier furniture glistened within, the heavy smooth dressers with pillars and gold inlay, the wardrobes with their laurels and garlands, the bedsteads with carved swan necks, the cracked brocade of the armchairs in the drawing room slumbered, the greasy leather chairs in the library stocked with the ranks of the Royal Prussian Army, the hunting calendar, Bismarck’s memoirs, and somehow stowed away there and forgotten about Heine’s Buch der Lieder; the pictures of the dead, their sabers, their pistols, their honour on the walls; a dog trotted over the sand, he didn’t know us, a ploughshare rusted, and my mother was speaking, all this is ours, she was screaming, she wanted to din it into me, get it into my thick head, knock it into my heart, that I too bore my share of disappointment and suffering, it was all meant to be my inheritance, because even though my mother was born in the town, in the narrow confines of poverty, she spoke of Ephraimshagen with the bitterness of someone who had been cheated, and I recognized in her small face eaten with fatigue the withered features of my grandmother, saw in my mothers young face my grandmothers wedding picture with the veil like a spider’s web draped over her head, daubed by a travelling brush-artist, a despised apprentice, who was given his meals in the kitchen, and who was probably also responsible for the classical ornaments on the walls and ceilings of the house and the frivolous, goose-pimpling figures of the gods basking on fleecy clouds, the ancient seduction, but it remained inexplicable and uncanny, the way he had contrived to suggest something he couldn’t have known, the disappointment of love, the false lustre of passion, impending ruin, all in the bride's smile and her eighteen-year-old’s garlanded hair, and I saw my grandmother as I had seen her with my infant senses, her face primed for tears with the now swollen and rigid expression of futile scrutiny, as she leaned down over my crib, radiating love and hate, I felt her despair nourishing itself into a mortal growth, because my birth looked like one last and final seal on the decline of the clan, on the loss of honour, on the forfeiture of land and respect; and my mother stared as into paradise along the bumpy clay drive, scabbed by the hooves of the tired shire horses, rutted by the iron-rimmed wheels of the harvest wagons, cast out expelled from notional security and foolish pride, but I failed to see the Edenic aspect, nothing there attracted me, and on my way home in the evening, midges buzzed and danced over the horrid pools of salt water, my mother heard a rustle in the dried grass, the snakes, she jumped, the treacherous adders of the Rosental, she ran off, the skies loured over the abattoir, thunder and lightning menaced the town, pushed against the famous Friedrich skyline, there were the foals tumbling in the meadow, the lonely men gazing sadly at the moon, the boats at anchor sleeping with their masts inclining dreamily to Africa, the roofs and steeples of St. Nikolai, St. Jakob, and St. Mary, oppressing the faithful with their bulk, their red brick stacked against the unattainable heaven, resembling crazed hypertrophic fortresses, grown old in desert, wilderness and swamp, and in the churches lay abandoned the empty naves, prayerless halls behind locked doors, withdrawn from the grace of confession and absolution, the unadorned Protestant altars, the pulpits of hectoring preachers, the lost rebellion of buried consciences, while all around the streets smelled complacently of smoked eel, of fried potato and fish suppers, bacon and bran bread, buckwheat kasha and lumpy groats, of respectability, sly head-down ordinariness, domestic stupidity and vindictiveness, of the decaying memory of the poor heroes of the war, of the conserved beautiful corpse of the empire, the Pasewalk cuirassier stabbed in the back picked out in red thread on kitchen linens, of the dueling blood of students dribbling over the stinking fraternity tunic into the sawdust of pubs, of the blood of those murdered by rabid nationalists and lowered into the peat bog, carried down to the Huns’ graves, of the blood of girls in their hidden undies stuffed down the back of the sofa, of asepsis and pus, of the anatomy of clinics, the sweat of patients, the horror of the dying, the fear of the examinee and the guilty innocents at the mercy of the prison-warders, of the madness of the deranged inmates of the institution on the other side of the tracks and the jokes that were made about them, of the rotted flowers of the cemeteries and the death that everyone carries in his chest, of the decaying puddle of moat water and effluent, of the panting of lovers under the bushes in the rowboats of summer, of the vanity of professors, the dead hearts of officials, the frowst of the laws, and then the poverty of the Lange Reihe and the indurated humiliation of the gray school, how I hated the city and wished it consigned to the snakes, a glib adder round every post that bore a roof or supported a bed and the deep sleep of the just.
That sentence, which comes in at just over 1,000 words, is either a beautifully sinuous work of art or, according to the Flesch Reading Ease score, “impossible to comprehend.”
If you want to quantify the readability of your stories, remember that not everything that counts can be counted.
Context matters
To make the best possible sentences, try organizing for sense and meaning. As an example, read this notice about lead in water:
Infants and children who drink water containing lead in excess of the action level could experience delays in their physical or mental development. Children could show slight deficits in attention span and learning abilities. Adults who drink this water over many years could develop kidney problems or high blood pressure.
Reorganizing into subheadings is one way to make it easier for your readers to follow:
Lead in drinking water can make you sick. Here are some possible health effects of high lead levels in your drinking water:
Children:
Delayed growth
Learning disabilities
Short attention span
Adults:
Kidney problems
High blood pressure
Use simple visuals
This is a multipurpose passenger vehicle which will handle and maneuver differently from an ordinary passenger car, in driving conditions which may occur on streets and highways and off road. As with other vehicles of this type, if you make sharp turns or abrupt maneuvers, the vehicle may roll over or may go out of control and crash. You should read driving guidelines and instructions in the Owner’s Manual, and WEAR YOUR SEAT BELTS AT ALL TIMES.
You might try to edit these sentences for length, but when you need to send an urgent, safety-related message, it’s far better to choose simple visuals paired with short telegraphic statements:
Learn from experts
It’s rare that you can see storytellers crafting sentences in real time, but there are some exceptions. Robert Olen Butler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer perhaps most famous for writing the non-Pulitzer-winning "The Insanest E-mail Ever," created a 34-hour, 17-part series in which he writes a story from beginning to end.
If you’re looking for other examples, try Ron Carlson Writes a Story, where the author goes step by step (and moves a little quicker than Robert Olen Butler). There is also Stephen King’s On Writing, where he line-edits some of his own work, criticizing his decisions along the way.
In the essay “Revising One Sentence,” Lydia Davis traces the evolution of a single sentence and its parts, explaining in parentheses what was wrong and what she did to fix it. She begins by offering the final version of the sentence—She walks around the house balancing on the balls of her feet, sometimes whistling and singing, sometimes talking to herself, sometimes stopping dead in a fencing position—and then working toward it, considering each part of the sentence as it was written and rewritten.
She is likely to walk around the house lightly on the balls of her feet … (bad rhyme here: likely/lightly)
She walks …
… around the house slowly … (doesn’t suggest happiness)
… around the house slowly but delicately … (too much explanation)
… around the house slowly, carefully … (not strong enough)
… around the house slowly, carefully, balancing on the balls of her feet … (too wordy)
… around the house slowly balancing on the balls of her feet … (good, I like it. then later I think too much and take out slowly; now the first part of the sentence is finished)
sometimes whistling, sometimes singing, sometimes talking to herself, sometimes … (no. too many sometimes)
sometimes whistling and singing, (no. can’t do both at once)
sometimes whistling or singing (no. sounds too deliberate)
sometimes whistling and singing (okay after all, can be one after the other)
sometimes stopping dead and assuming a fencing position (no. too many -ings in there. but I know I have to end with fencing position—it’s the culminating, striking image; it’s what made me write the sentence down in the first place. it’s also a strong phrase, and the word position is a strong word)
sometimes stopping dead in a fencing position (cutting solved the -ing problem)
Note the hesitation here, the back and forth, the care Davis lavishes on her work to arrive at a single sentence in its final form. You get the sense that with such attentiveness you’ll always be in good hands. There’s a comfort with language here, and it shows. But it’s not an effortless comfort. Davis labors over each sentence from its humble beginnings in her notebooks.
“Every story I write begins in the notebook,” Davis says, “and in fact is usually written entirely in the notebook. There is a good reason for that, though it took me a while to realize it: in the notebook nothing has to be permanent or good. Here I have complete freedom and so I am not afraid. You can’t write well—you can’t do anything well—if you feel cornered.”