Re: Jacey's final synopsis, title and thanks

On Sat, 3 May 2008 17:27:32 +0100, Jonathan L Cunningham
<spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:1igdgt9.3uh5th8gl0azN%spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

Zeborah <zeborah@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jonathan L Cunningham <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I still think, for the sort of person who analyses
things into separate factors, that "sentence length" is
one of the easier things to notice and think about. And
it is an easy thing to change. I'm a little
surprised[*] that this viewpoint has been opposed so
venomously, although I'm completely unsurprised if not
everyone finds it a useful way to think about their
writing.

It is really hard to oppose your viewpoint when it's so
difficult to figure out what it is.

Why do you want to oppose it?

I think that she's simply playing off your 'opposed so
venomously': in her case, at least, it's not so much
opposition as incomprehension. In mine it's a bit of both,
but the more you post on the subject, the more
incomprehension is gaining the upper hand.

"Long sentences are inherently weak."
"The longer a sentence, the weaker it becomes."
"If one seems longer than the other, then I say it is longer."
"It may be 'not long enough' when it is twenty words, or too long at
five."

These all mean different things. The last two in particular mean
*opposite* things.

I don't think so, although I agree that the last two are saying
different things. But by no means opposite.

Actually, I agree that they all mean different things.
Complementary[*] things.

The second and fourth are hard to reconcile completely: if
it's possible for a sentence to be 'not long enough', then
it's probably not always true that '[t]he longer the
sentence, the weaker it becomes'.

[...]

You said, up-thread, "in context, it should be quite
clear what I mean". Yes, in an ideal world it ought to
be. But it patently is not.

Perhaps I was being optimistic. I will retract that
remark, and replace it with "I would hope that it is
clear from context". It appears that it is a forlorn
hope.

Look, at this point, the longer your explanations the
less I understand them.

Ok. I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps I am unable to guess
correctly what it is that you don't understand. I am at a
loss as to why.

Because your explanations seem (to both of us, apparently)
to belong to different assertions, and (at least in my case)
because I don't know what you mean by 'weak'. One of your
explanations suggests that you mean something like
'containing words that aren't doing anything useful', but
since the same explanation seems to define 'too long' in
essentially the same way, I'm hesitant to accept either
interpretation: you don't usually indulge in tautology.

Perhaps when you don't understand my latest attempt at
explanation (below), you would venture more clues as to
what you don't understand about them?

If you really want to talk about this, can you go right
back to the start, quote Jacey's sentence again, and
just talk about sentence length in relation to that?

Ok. I'll need to quote the first part of the exchange, to
put my first remark in context.

Bill Swears wrote, in commenting on Jacey's synopsis:

[Jacey wrote]
:> Jenny is skeptical about all of it at first, but she returns to
:> the Common on the spring equinox - when the Divide is at its most
:> fragile - and calls Tom to her with music, learning that he's bound
:> to do the bidding of the amoral Lady, the Queen of the Fey, as her
:> servant, her minstrel and her lover, for seven (faerie) years, at
:> the end of which he is destined to be her tithe to Hell.

: Sorry, but this sentence is too long for me to wrap my head around.
: Perhaps you could break it into two? I'd put a period after music,
: then start the next with She learns that. . .

Brian commented:

: I've no problem with the long sentence that bothers Bill, but then I
: *like* long sentences, so that may not mean much.

And I said:

: Like Brian, I didn't really notice the long sentence
: either but, unlike Brian, I agree that it would be
: improved by splitting it into two sentences. Long
: sentences are inherently weak. Short sentences bite. You
: want bite in a hook/synopsis.

To which Brian replied:

:> Long sentences are inherently weak.

: Piffle. That's almost as bad as 'passive voice is
: inherently weak'.

Now, that annoyed me, because "avoid the passive voice"
(or whatever) is actually useful advice if you take it as
meant, and not as one of the Ten Commandments. Let me
rephrase that: the actual advice about passive voice
takes probably at least a couple of paragraphs to
explain, with examples, and I'm sure it's possible to
find one of Patricia's posts explaining it.

And I'm willing to bet that none of those posts could
reasonably be summarized as 'avoid the passive voice' or
even 'the passive voice is inherently weak'; see, for
instance, her <Y4Wdnd3g8fXNEYnVnZ2dnUVZ_rWtnZ2d@visi>,
posted on 27 April in this thread, whose message is 'use it
when it's needed, and don't use it when it's not needed'.

In my opinion 'avoid the passive voice' is *not* useful
advice.

But, in the real world, we need a shorthand to refer to
things. We can't write three paragraphs of disclaimer
every time. If, in a crit circle say, I happen to know
that you are a competent writer, and understand all about
when to use passive voice or not, then I can scribble
"avoid the passive" in the margin of something you have
written and expect you to know what I mean, i.e. that, in
some specific case, I think you should reconsider the use
of the passive, because it would be better rewritten as
active.

Why invoke a silly 'rule' when you could as easily write a
brief diagnosis -- 'passive seems ineffective', 'weak
passive' (yes, I quite agree that some are), 'better as
active voice?', or the like.

Whether you agree with that crit would then be up
to you. [And, if you got annoyed by the "advice", I would
consider you to be too demanding of your critters, and
wonder how long you could continue to receive useful
crits before your critters got fed up and stopped
bothering.]

To be honest, if you routinely offered advice in the form of
such directives, I'd probably not be looking to you for
sentence-level criticism anyway.

[...]

The problem, ISTM, is the insistence on first taking a
throwaway remark and insisting on treating it as an
absolute law - one of the Ten Commandments - and then,
when I say it isn't, insisting that I should provide one
of Patricia's clear explanations for a shorthand-concept
that seems so obvious to me that I hadn't really thought
about it in that level of detail.

It wasn't stated in the form of a commandment; it was,
however, stated as an unqualified universal, and I really
don't think that you can reasonably blame people for reading
it as such. You could as easily have said 'Long sentences
tend to be weak', after all. (I might then have asked what
you meant by 'weak', but I'd probably not have piffled.)

ISTM that people who have accepted "nine-and-sixty ways"
and "there are no absolute rules in writing" are being
inconsistent when they ask me to define an absolute rule
which encapsulates what I mean.

I don't think that anyone has done so, though at least three
have asked for clarification.

[...]

--without reference to the rest of this tangled thread,
and including the sort of qualifiers and disclaimers
appropriate to include when talking to someone who knows
nothing about writing and who might be tempted to turn
your ideas into Rules. Possibly even someone who's an
artificial intelligence.

I shall make another attempt. This time without examples
(since they didn't work before).

First, I got the notion from a "Reader's Digest" aphorism,
many, many years ago. The aphorism was:

"Words are like sunbeams: the more they are condensed, the
more they burn."

Now, whether or not you agree with that, I think the
meaning is quite clear.

And, to me, it's all of a kind with "don't use a general
word when you can be specific" and "avoid too many
adjectives" and dozens of other similar pieces of advice.
Many of these general pieces of advice boil down to:
write shorter. That's not what they *say* but that's the
effect of them. So I can remember a whole bunch of
different pieces of writing advice by a single aphorism:
short sentences are stronger than long ones.

<glurk> Okay. But to me it seems pretty odd to use length
as an inverse surrogate for effectiveness, impact, and
whatever else you include in 'strength' -- especially when
it *doesn't* work for one of the more useful general
principles ('unless there's a good reason to use a generic
term, a specific one is usually more effective').

As I read this, your original assertion is really a mnemonic
for something like 'a great many of the techniques for
increasing the effectiveness of your writing have the
(side-)effect of shortening sentences'. I've no real
quarrel with this, though I strongly suspect that we differ
significantly in our judgements of effectiveness. But I
really don't see how I could have guessed that this was what
you meant by 'Long sentences are inherently weak'.

[...]

I'm quite prepared for disagreement: both Alma and Brian
will disagree because they like long sentences; Nicky
likes (or at least writes) short sentences, but also
disagrees.

I think that you misunderstand both the nature and the basis
of my disagreement so far in this thread; it's water under
the bridge now, so I'll say only that neither has much to do
with the fact that I rather like long sentences.

[...]

Brian
.

Relevant Pages

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