Instruction
How long should your sentences be? It depends. If you are like Annie Proulx, your sentences will be short, choppy, often incomplete:
Quoyle woke in the empty room. Grey light. A sound of hammering. His heart. He lay in his sleeping bag in the middle of the floor. The candle on its side. Could smell the wax, smell the pages of the book that lay open beside him, the dust in the floor cracks.
Neutral light illumined the window. The hammering again and a beating shadow in the highest panes. A bird. (from The Shipping News)
If you are more like Virginia Woolf, however, your sentences will be gargantuan:
As she lurched (for she rolled like a ship at sea) and leered (for her eyes fell on nothing directly, but with a sidelong glance that deprecated the scorn and anger of the world— she was witless, she knew it), as she clutched the banisters and hauled herself upstairs and rolled from room to room, she sang. Rubbing the glass of the long looking-glass and leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound issued from her lips—something that had been gay twenty years before on the stage perhaps, had been hummed and danced to, but now, coming from the toothless, bonneted, care-taking woman, was robbed of meaning, was like the voice of witlessness, humor, persistency itself, trodden down but springing up again, so that as she lurched, dusting, wiping, she seemed to say how it was one long sorrow and trouble, how it was getting up and going to bed again, and bringing things out and putting them away again. It was not easy or snug this world she had known for close on seventy years. Bowed down she was with weariness. (from To the
Lighthouse)
You notice that in both cases, the writer uses sentence length to create a rhetorical effect on the reader. Proulx crafts her sparse prose to reflect Quoyle’s anxious state of mind. Woolf wants to imitate the movement and stream of consciousness of the lurching and leering of an elderly woman cleaning the house. You may have noticed that
Woolf uses complex structures to make her sentences long, as in the first sentence how the base clause—“she sang”—comes at the end after two subordinate clauses beginning with “as.” She also mixes both loose and periodic sentence styles into the same sentence.
Another way writers make long sentences is by using the conjunction and to connect clauses to keep the string going. This method is called polysyndeton (Gk. poly “many,”
syndeton “bound together with”) and is most often used in what has been called
“creative” writing. American author Cormac McCarthy is a master of polysyndeton:

Small orphans were abroad like irate dwarfs and fools and sots drooling and flailing about in the small markets of the metropolis and the prisoners rode past the carnage in the meatstalls and the waxy smell where racks of guts hung black with flies and flayings of meat in great red sheets now darkened with the advancing day and the flensed and naked skulls of cows and sheep with their dull blue eyes glaring wildly and the stiff bodies of deer and javelina and ducks and quail and parrots, all wild things from the country round hanging head downward from hooks. (from Blood Meridian)
These examples illustrate the different stylistic methods at our command when writing sentences. In academic writing, however, we may not have as many options as these writers—not because academic types do not write creatively, but because the genre of the academic essay is intended primarily to explain concepts or argue positions in a professional, institutional setting (i.e., the university) to an audience expecting more formal, professional writing (i.e., the teacher). This does not mean, of course, that when we write, say, an analysis essay, we cannot vary our sentence lengths creatively.
We can create rhythm and intensity in our academic writing by varying our sentence lengths. Even if the variation does not appear to be dramatic, the reader appreciates it when we break up the monotony. Here is an example of effective variation of sentence length from an academic book, Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam:
The most obvious suspect behind our tendency to drop out of community affairs is pervasive busyness. This is everybody’s favorite explanation for social disengagement.
We certainly feel busier now than Americans did a generation ago: the proportion of us who say we “always feel rushed” jumped by more than half between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s. The groups that feel most harried are full-time workers, women, people aged twenty-five to fifty-four, and parents of younger children, especially single parents.
These patterns are hardly surprising, yet these same groups have historically been especially active in community life. Perhaps the villain of the piece is simply overwork.
From this example we see that it is often effective to make emphatic, short statements at the beginning or ending of our paragraphs.
Exercises
1.
Read the following sentence as an example of the way a writer can “add on” to a simple clause like “Abortion is a complex issue.”
Though many individuals seem confident in their convictions, firm in their belief that they understand the issue better than others, or assured that the issue is a matter of simple black and white, abortion is a complex issue involving religion, reproductive rights, law, medicine, and the raw emotions of the human heart, and as a complex issue it requires from us careful deliberation, thorough reflection, and, above all, charity—all activities that ought to mitigate the intensity of the standard, and nearly always caustic, choice/life argument.

Now practice “adding on” to one of your own simple sentences in a similar way.
2.
Find a paragraph of your own writing (or the writing of a peer) that has sentences that seem to be the same length. How can you vary the sentence lengths to create a rhetorical effect? Rewrite the paragraph using subordination, coordination, and different sentence lengths. (You can use loose or periodic structures as well.) Read your new paragraph out loud either to a peer or to the entire class.