Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Vary Sentence Length

I found a an example of varied sentence length in the very beginning of one of my favorite novels "The Pelican Brief."

"Biggest crowd ever!" Rosenberg yelled at the window. He was almost deaf. Jason Kline, his senior law clerk, stood behind him. It was the first Monday in October, the opening day of the new term, and this had become a traditional celebration of the First Amendment. A glorious celebration. Rosenberg was thrilled. To him, freedom of speech meant freedom to riot.

I find varying sentence length to be one of the most important aspects of style in writing. It breaks things up. By breaking things up you retain more. I have included an example of the lack of variation in sentence length below:

Peter obediently fell on his side-a little wheeze escaped him-and rolled on his back, legs splayed out. That almost amused Anderson, but today the sight of her dog playing Viet Cong (Peter would also play dead at the words "hooch" or "My Lai") was too close to what she had been thinking about.

This exert was taken from Stephen King's "The Tommyknockers." The long, clunky sentences create a hard to read passage.

The way that the sentence length varies makes the first paragraph more interesting. It catches, and holds the reader's attention. By varying the sentence length Grisham also creates a sense of rhythm and sets a tone for the rest of the novel.


2 comments:

  1. Varying sentence-length and vocabulary are both very important to the composition of interesting writing. Whenever I write, I try to imagine as if someone is reading along with me, almost reading word-for-word as I am typing. Obviously, this is not happening, but imaging how someone would read each and your work can help with the varying the length of the sentences and creating more interesting sentences.

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  2. I like varying sentence length as well, it makes the reading go by faster. The two writers that you used as examples write very different things though. Stephen King writes horror, so you will need longer sentences to describe details to create a visual. While John Grisham writes more dramatic books, so you don't really need long sentences of descriptive detail to create drama.

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