How to write long sentences that work, ft. Gary Provost

The picture below, posted regularly on Reddit, advises readers that they can make their writing sing by varying their sentence length. It’s one of Gary Provost’s 100 Ways to Improve your Writing, and it’s alright advice as far as it goes. The trouble is that Provost forgot to explain how to craft long or short sentences. Of course, it’s easy to just write a long sentence: you keep gluing ‘and’s on the end. But it’s more fiddly to craft a long sentence that doesn’t sprawl or drag or confuse your reader.

Happily, however, Provost makes up for his lack of explanation by his example, using some excellent methods in the long blue-highlighted sentence above. And it is that long sentence we’ll be looking at because I don’t know anything about crafting short sentences. Sorry. To make it up to you, I’ll show how JFK used the very same techniques as Provost to craft a magnificent sentence for his inaugural address. So: how did Provost do it, how did JFK do it, and how can we do it?

Use summative and resumptive modifiers

The first things that makes Provost’s long sentence work are the summative and resumptive modifiers, ‘—sounds’ and ‘, a sentence’. I know they sound complex, but don’t worry, they’re not. And I know they sound dull, but try reading the sentence without them:

And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals that say listen to this, it is important.

Now the sentence lurches like a drunkard, and it’s hard to make out what the final ‘that’ refers to. This is where summative and resumptive modifiers help. Let’s define them first:

• A resumptive modifier 1ends the previous segment with a comma or dash, 2repeats key word(s) of a previous topic, and then 3continues on as a relative clause: ‘engage him with a sentence of considerable length1, 2a sentence 3that burns with energy’.
• Summative modifiers are much the same: they 1end the previous segment with a comma or dash, 2summarise the essence of a previous topic, and then 3continue as a relative clause: ‘the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals1—2sounds 3that say listen to this’.

The comma and the repetition break up long sentences, giving the reader a moment to pause and catch their breath. And because these modifiers specify the topic, they help the reader to keep track of what’s going on, to see what the ‘that’s refer to. So if you’ve got a long sentence or have lots of ‘that’s, help your readers out by introducing some summative or resumptive modifiers.

JFK did that very thing in the following soaring sentence from his inaugural address. See if you can spot the resumptive modifier.

Now the trumpet summons us again, not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need, not as a call to battle, though embattled we are, but as a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, disease, poverty, and war itself.

Without the resumptive modifier, we’d have ‘bear the burden of a long twilight struggle—year in and year out, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation—against the common enemies of man’. That’s baffling and unattractive, an unattractiveness which provides the greatest reason to use resumptive modifiers: they sound so elegant.

Just to show that elegant doesn’t have to mean boring or heavy, here’s Wodehouse using a resumptive modifier:

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame1, 2the shifty hangdog look 3which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

The Luck of the Bodkins, 1935

Coordinate your phrases

The second thing that Provost does is to coordinate the elements of his sentence. Coordinations instantly show the reader which parts of your sentence are parallel or equivalent to each other. You coordinate phrases by making them reflect each other’s syntax, words, cadence and so on: ‘what’s sauce for the goose | is sauce for the gander’. Here’s Provost’s sentence, structured to illuminate the coordinations:

And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length,

a sentence that	1burns with energy and
	builds with all the impetus of a crescendo,	2the roll of the drums,
		the crash of the cymbals
	—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

The first coordination’s parts (‘burns …’ and ‘builds …’) are parallel: ‘burns’ and ‘builds’ alliterate, are both one syllable, and are both in the present tense; ‘with’ corresponds to ‘with’; and ‘energy’ and ‘impetus’ have a similar meaning. The second coordination’s elements match each other even more closely: only ‘roll/crash’ and ‘drums/cymbals’ change, but those words’ meanings are strongly related.

These equivalences enable us to instinctively grasp what Provost is saying. They help us feel the shape of the sentence, as the sounds and syntax show us which phrases are structurally parallel. And the parallel forms allow us to process what he’s saying faster: when we’ve understood one phrase, it’s easy to understand a similar one.

JFK’s coordinations are more complicated—he even has coordinations within coordinations—but they do the same job. They allow him to say an awful lot without confusing us. Here’s a breakdown:

Now the trumpet summons us again:	not as a call to bear arms,	though arms we need
	not as a call to battle,	though embattled we are
	but as a call to bear the burden of a long twilight

struggle,	year in	and year out,
	rejoicing in hope,	patient in tribulation,

a struggle against the common enemies of man:

tyranny, disease, poverty, and war itself.

I should say that your coordinated phrases don’t need to be short, or even very close in their form:

We need to create fixed teams for the different consumer products,

        and to ensure that our R&D stays well ahead of the opposition.

That sentence shows another thing too: like modifiers, coordination can make even dull sentences elegant and pleasant, a topic to which we now turn.

Use coordinations, and summative modifiers and resumptive modifiers to sound eloquent

Coordinations and modifiers sound eloquent because they echo other parts of the sentence. We like the sound of rhyme, rhythm and repetition. And when we use them ourselves, our words sound weighty, stately and eloquent. If you’ve ever wondered how Obama sounds so good, this is it. He does it all the time. Here’s a regular Obama sentence from his inaugural address, replete with a resumptive modifier, and four coordinations.

What is required of us now is

a new era of responsibility —a recognition, on the part of every American that we have

duties to

ourselves, our nation, and the world,

duties that we

do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly,

firm in the knowledge that there is nothing

so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character,

than giving our all to a difficult task.

A task such as writing exceedingly long sentences. But even Obama doesn’t use such intricate sentences all the time. The one above finished a long section, a section he wanted to end with a stirring verbal flourish. As Provost pointed out, grand sentences ‘say listen to this, it is important’. So deploy your most impressive constructions sparingly, using them to conclude or draw attention to your most impressive points.