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Sentence Tip # 1 - The Speed of Short

February 1st, 2007 | models, sentence tips, sentences, writing

There’s a story about George Washington Carver. He asked God to reveal the secrets of the universe, and God was silent. He asked God to reveal the secrets of science and biology, and God was silent. Then he asked God to reveal the secrets of the peanut, and God did.

I don’t care about peanuts. But you could say I’ve spent the last ten years asking God to help me understand the secrets of a sentence. And I’ve worked hard to show God that I’m serious about the question.

Along the way, I’ve learned some tricks about how sentences work, and I thought I would share those in a regular series called simply “Sentence Tips.”

Let’s start with the easiest tricks I know—the effect of sentence length. Here it is in a nut shell. Are you ready?

Short sentences move quickly.

I’m talking about pacing here. In creative writing workshops, I remember the deadliest comment of all. “Your pacing seems off.” That’s workshop code for “the story was slow.” And everyone knows slow writing = boring writing. At least, slow writing is often boring.

Enough abstraction. Take a look at a master in action. This passage comes from a chapter called “How To Tell a True War Story” in The Things They Carried. The master is Tim O’Brien. In this passage, an American soldier in Vietnam is describing the actions of a platoon that has become spooked in the jungle.

The guys can’t cope. They lose it. They get on the radio and report enemy movement—a whole army, they say—and they order up the firepower. They get arty and gunships. They call in air strikes. And I’ll tell you . . . all night long, they just smoke those mountains. They make jungle juice. They blow away trees and glee clubs and whatever else there is to blow away. Scorch time. They walk napalm up and down the ridges. They bring in the Cobras and F-4s, they use Willie Petter and HE and incendiaries. It’s all fire. They make those mountains burn.

Those are some short sentences. And, man, they move. You can see how the choppy thoughts also do a good job of imitating human speech—even though in reality people ramble on and on and on when they talk without ever even working toward something like a conclusion or a period or a moment to pause and breathe and give their listeners a chance to get a word in edgewise. Or maybe that’s just me.

When I was a teacher, something like this always turned into an assignment. Why not here too? Imitate O’Brien. It’s the best form of flattery. And I’ll even do it myself later tonight. (But don’t feel you can’t comment unless you try the assignment. I’m not handing out grades here, people.)

The assignment: Write a paragraph with intense conflict and make sure your sentences average 5-7 words in length.


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