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Q&A Very long sentences: personal style or just bad writing?

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...

posted 8y ago by Reed‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T02:39:39Z (almost 5 years ago)
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 by user avatar Reed‭ · 2019-12-08T02:39:39Z (almost 5 years ago)
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)

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2016-08-23T04:03:38Z (about 8 years ago)
Original score: 0