alt Hacker NewsI've always been struck by how long sentences are in writing from a century or more ago. To my mind whose attention-span has been poisoned by YouTube Shorts (even if they are mostly about trigonometry) and Tweets (even if I tell myself that's the new newspaper), they are most difficult to read. I often have to restart from the beginning.
Albeit an extreme example, here's a sentence from Henry James' "The Ambassadors", 1909:
The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive - the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe.
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I remember reading the sentences in Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and thinking this. A hell of a job to parse some of these.
Audiobook narrators often get it wrong reading these older texts, they'll put emphasis in the wrong place.
I recently picked up Washington Square, and while it has that old-fashioned flavor you describe, I was struck by how readable the long sentences and baroque turns of phrase were. They flow well, they're easy to parse. And the chapters have a Netflixy, binge-able quality. I got through it much faster than I expected.
> I've always been struck by how long sentences are in writing from a century or more ago
May I recommend Ulysses by James Joyce
Likewise! I often marvel at the patience of readers of earlier times. Of course, they had more time and fewer distractions, and I suspect that there was a dynamic at work in which both the writer and reader derived a certain satisfaction from long meandering sentences, the writer proving their skill, and the reader proving (to themselves) their stamina.
Nowadays we tend to write in a plainer style demanding a smaller “parser stack”. Some style manuals have excellent examples of sentences of equal length but very different “stack depth” and thus ease of comprehension.