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Q&A Why don't writers add commas to lengthy sentences, to make them far more readable?

Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin. Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read (Great Courses) (2013). p. 124.         Listen to the stri...

2 answers  ·  posted 6y ago by Chrome‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T10:46:52Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/41872
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Chrome‭ · 2019-12-08T10:46:52Z (almost 5 years ago)
Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, [Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin](https://english.uiowa.edu/people/brooks-landon). _Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read_ (Great Courses) [(2013)](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0452298601). p. 124.

> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Listen to the striking opening sentence of Joseph Conrad’s story “The Secret Sharer”:
> 
> > On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes[,] resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect[,] as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen[,] now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach.

Why didn’t Conrad and other writers use commas as Landon did in square brackets?

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-02-02T22:47:06Z (almost 6 years ago)
Original score: 1