Sentences. The Long and Short of It.

Which is better – to write using long or short sentences? 

A simple question I wondered about. Many writing manuals propagate the use of short sentences, while in older works of literature, sentences of up to one hundred words are commonplace. The average sentence length in modern written English works is between fifteen and twenty words.

Hemingway, famous for his short words and prose, averaged around ten words. He used short sentences for dramatic effect. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro when the protagonist is nearing death, Hemingway writes: “All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain.” But not all his sentences were short. In The Old Man and the Sea for instance, he tells of the old fisherman: “Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed?  He thought.”

On a philosophical note, Verlyn Klinkenborg says: “Imagine it this way: One by one, each sentence takes the stage. It says the very thing it comes into existence to say. Then it leaves the stage. It doesn’t help the previous one down or the next one up. It doesn’t wave to its friends in the audience. Or pause to be acknowledged or applauded. It doesn’t talk about what it is saying. It simply says its piece and leaves the stage. This isn’t the whole art of writing well. Or even most of it. But it’s a place to begin, and to begin from again and again. “

Which sheds light on the nature of sentences, but still – an ideal length? 

Gary Provost writes:

"This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.

Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals--sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader's ear. Don't just write words. Write music."

I found the answer.

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On a lighter side, in 1913 Ellis O. Jones wrote:

"Writers who wish to impart to their productions power and pungency, who wish to keep the reader's attention upon the tiptoe of activity, who desire to escape the imputation of pedantry and who seek to surcharge their sentiments with sparkle and spirit, will do well to bear in mind constantly that long, lingering sentences, unduly overburdened with an abundance of phrases, clauses, and parenthetical observations of a more or less digressive character, are apt to be tiresome to the reader, especially if the subject matter be at all profound or ponderous, to place an undue strain upon his powers of concentration and to leave him with a confused concept of the ideas which the writer apparently has been at great pains to concentrate, while short, snappy sentences, on the other hand, with the frequent recurrence of subject and predicate, thus recalling and emphasizing the idea to be expressed as the development of the thought proceeds, like numerous signposts upon an untraveled road, these frequent breaks having the effect of taking a new hold upon the reader's attention, oases in the desert of words, as it were, will be found to be much more effective, much more conducive to clarity, and far better calculated to preserve the contact, the wireless connection, so to speak, between the writer and the reader, provided, however, and it is always very easy to err through a too strict and too literal application of a general rule, that the sentences are not so short as to give a jerky, choppy, and sketchy effect and to scatter the reader's attention so often as to send him wool-gathering completely."