Ensuring that sentence length is appropriate

What's the "right" length for a sentence? How long is too long?

There were equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home island, delightful sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering a pleth­ora of attractions as well as a bracing tonic for the system in and around Dublin and its picturesque environs, even, Poulaphouca, to which there was a steam tram, but also farther away from the madding crowd, in Wicklow, rightly termed the garden of Ireland, an ideal neighbourhood for elderly wheelmen, so long as it didn't come down, and in the wilds of Donegal, where if report spoke true, the coup d'oeil was exceedingly grand, though the lastnamed locality was not easily getable so that the influx of visitors was not as yet all that it might be considering the signal benefits to be derived from it, while Howth with its historic associations and otherwise, Silken Thomas, Grace O'Malley, George IV, rhododendrons several hundred feet above sealevel was a favourite haunt with all sorts and conditions of men, especially in the spring when young men's fancy, though it had its own toll of deaths by falling off the cliffs by design or accidentally, usually, by the way, on their left leg, it being only about three quarters of an hour's run from the pillar. [202 words]

James Joyce, Ulysses

Now and then during the next six months he returned to town, but he did not again even see or pass the restaurant.... Perhaps he did not need to. More often than that he knew perhaps thinking would have suddenly flowed into a picture, shaping, shaped: the long, barren, somehow equivocal counter with the still, coldfaced, violenthaired woman at one end as though guarding it, and at the other men withinwardleaning heads, smoking steadily, lighting and throwing away their constant cigarettes, and the waitress, the woman not much larger than a child going back and forth to the kitchen with her arms over­laden with dishes, having to pass on each journey within touching distance of the men who leaned with their slanted hats and spoke to her through the cigarette smoke, murmured to her somewhere near mirth or exultation, and her face musing, demure, downcast, as if she had not heard. [123 words]

William Faulkner, Light in August

How short is too short?

The Italians were even more dangerous. They were frightened and firing on anything they saw. Last night on the retreat we had heard that there had been many Germans in Italian uniforms mixing with the retreat in the north. I did not believe it. That was one of those things you always heard in the war. It was one of the things the enemy always did to you. You did not know any one who went over in German uniform to confuse them. Maybe they did but it sounded difficult. I did not believe the Germans did it. I did not believe they had to. There was no need to confuse our retreat. The size of the army and the fewness of the roads did that. Nobody gave any orders, let alone Germans. Still, they would shoot us for Germans. They shot Aymo....

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

A blur outside the car... Sherman grabbed the door pull and with a tremendous adrenal burst banged it shut. Out of the corner of his eye, the big one – almost to the door on Maria's side. Sherman hit the lock mechanism. Rap! He was yanking on the door handle – inches from Maria's head with only the glass in between. Maria shoved the Mercedes into first gear and squealed forward. The youth leaped to one side. The car was heading straight for the trash cans. Maria hit the brakes. Sherman was thrown against the dash. A vanity case landed on top of the gearshift. Sherman pulled it off. Now it was on his lap. Maria threw the car into reverse. It shot backward. He glanced to his right. The skinny one... The skinny boy was standing there staring at him... pure fear on his delicate face...

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

The fact is, there is no defined minimum/maximum range, and it would be improper for any style book to dictate one. Sometimes long rambling sentences work well (provided they are punctuated into digestible chunks); the effect may be to produce a dreamy or stream-of-consciousness mood. A series of short, staccato sentences may work to set a mood of tension or drama.

In general, though – and particularly in the case of novice au­thors – neither extreme is advisable. The above excerpts have em­ployed unusual sentence lengths for literary effect, but what works in the hands of a skilled novelist may fall very flat in the hands of one less experienced. And in nonfiction writing – that is, any sort of writing where the goal is to convey information, not to set a mood – very long sentences are likely to come through as disorga­nized and verbose, and very short ones as choppy and stilted. In some genres of writing, such as quick-reference brochures or books for young children, even moderately long sentences would be inap­propriate, while in genres such as scholarly journals, too-short sen­tences might appear simplistic and unprofessional.

Usually, the most pleasing effect is produced by variation: most sentences of moderate length (say, between fifteen and thirty words), the occasional one notably longer or shorter. What you want to avoid is a monotonous uniformity, with every sentence looking as if it came out of the same mold.

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