Post History
I am not a native speaker and I have trouble with long sentences. A long sentence is tiring to the eye and requires more concentration. Long is bad; you need to come up for air. Sometimes, a long...
Answer
#3: Attribution notice added
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24279 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
I am not a native speaker and I have trouble with long sentences. A long sentence is tiring to the eye and requires more concentration. Long is bad; you need to come up for air. Sometimes, a longer sentence may be needed to break the pattern of medium and short sentences, but even then a long sentence should not be longer than [about 50 words](https://jgwritingtips.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/how-long-should-a-sentence-be/). Some academic writers using long sentences are tolerable because it is the subject matter and not the style that is important, but for creative writing, to me, it is a definite no-no. Yes, some authors get away with them, so it may be in part subjective. I agree that the “and & and” model works for some over-excited children, in some circumstances, but I think that most children will tend to speak in short bursts of short sentences and fragments. There are some related Q in Writer's SE like [seeking a humorous example of long winded paragraph one sentence long](https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/19534/seeking-a-humorous-example-of-long-winded-paragraph-one-sentence-long/19536#19536), and [What's the difference between purple prose and vividly descriptive writing?](https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/14329/whats-the-difference-between-purple-prose-and-vividly-descriptive-writing/14339#14339)