I love short sentences, and I work hard to convince academic writers to use them. But that is no reason to reject all the long ones. Some sentences are so long as to be awe-inspiring, so drawn out as to be delightful, so unremitting they leave us breathless. I’ll celebrate the lovely long ones in this series.
Deb Perelman, over at Smitten Kitchen, excels at the long sentence. Almost every post has a gem that leaves me admiring the possibilities between periods. Here is one from her second cookbook:
- Even the people who are ostensibly cheering for you to cook can do more harm than good, be they restaurant chefs who forget you may not have a line of prep cooks at your disposal, recipe writers who alienate the budget-conscious by insisting on the “best” olive oil, or home-cooking advocates who tell you the very best thing you can do for your health/your children’s IQ/the economy/environment/nothing short of this earth (oh, the pressure!) is cook dinner every night—people who have clearly not spent a lot of time in the chaos of most households at Hangry O’Clock.
This sentence clocks in at 98 words or 473 characters (excluding spaces!). Its structure is simple enough: its length comes from a list. But every item on the list is almost its own sentence. Deb uses dashes to interrupt herself, parentheses for asides, and we can hear her talking at a rapid pace through our screens. It works.
