There is, of course, an elision of what different types of writings are trying to do. Scott Fitzgerald bromide about editing being the murder of one’s darlings. The Grub Street Modernists who revolutionized literature according to the strictures of journalism tended towards style advice which was tellingly violent-recall the F. White and William Strunk’s The Elements of Style, of course-demands that a “sentence should contain no unnecessary words.” I’d suggest that Orwell, Zinsser, Strunk, and White-great authors all-are not just enraptured to an arbitrary definition of good style which consists in saying the most with the least, but that they’re very much creatures of their time, chained to the material conditions of paper margin inches and allergic to anything which seems too affected, too rococo, too aesthetic, too unmasculine. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction… these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.”įinally, the seemingly most iconic, most canonical, and downright scriptural of style guides-E.B. George Orwell in his essay “Politics and the English Language” offers among his commandments the injunction that “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” Meanwhile, journalist William Zinsser in his classic Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction advises that the “secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. The tyranny of the “short sentences only” set can be traced back to any number of style guides that have long proliferated in composition classrooms and editors’ offices. No doubt my proffered example of a long sentence, with which I began this paragraph, will not appeal to every reader, which is fine, but to those who hold as inviolate that the only good sentence is a short one, I’m happy to offer an interjection that’s simply two words, the first a scatological curse and the second a pronoun. Within a long sentence-clause upon clause, the commas and semicolons, em-dashes and colons, parentheticals and appositions piling up-there can be a veritable maze of imagery, a labyrinth of connotation, a factory of concepts the baroque and purple sentence is simultaneously an archive of consciousness at its most caffeinated and a dream of new worlds from words alone. With punctuation, a sense of the rhythm of language could be imparted, an artfulness, a lyricism, a poetry. Unlike the rather cumbersome and labyrinthine sentence with which I began this essay, by definition every sentence in the Mesha Stele was but a single word, and if you’re to adhere to contemporary style mavens who are nothing but partisans of parsimony, perhaps the mono-worded sentences of the Moabite stone are to be preferred. For that matter, just as distinguishing day from night creates both, so was the first period the mother of the first sentence. Though this simple bit of punctuation had much the same purpose as the whole bevy of descendants who’ve since emerged-commas, semicolons, my beloved em-dashes-namely, to make the sense of reading easier, there were also a host of ancillary effects. Profundity is often the daughter of convenience. No doubt the Moabite’s periods were used to interrupt the so-called scriptio continua of ancient writing wherebywordswouldbemergedtogetherinamannerthat’sdifficulttoread.

The Mesha Stele is, as such, the oldest example of writing to contain punctuation.

Though the anonymous scribe who chiseled this message nine centuries before the Common Era used the period in a way that we’d find idiosyncratic-the marks separating every individual word rather than ending individual syntactical units-it’s still clearly and obviously the same punctuation mark with which you’ll see at the end of this line. Now displayed at the Louvre, pieced back together after a group of Bedouins protesting the Ottoman occupation smashed the stele, a visitor can see the characteristic dot of an end-stop after each word of the inscription. “I am Mesha, son of Kemoshyat,” reads the inscription, “the king of Moab.” The meter-tall stone that has come to be called the Mesha Stele, its smooth, black basalt carved some sixteen centuries before it was unearthed from the packed, red sand of Dhiban, Jordan in 1868, is arguably most important for what comes at the conclusion of all of its sentences: a period.

Examples of microcosm in a sentence