Hey, it’s Mr. Sato.
I’m going to teach you about sentence fluency.
When I’ve asked students why a particular piece of writing sounds better than another,
sometimes they’ll say, “it just flows better,” which isn’t inaccurate, but is
imprecise and vague.
A more technical term for the general territory of flowiness is sentence fluency.
Sentence fluency is the flow and rhythm of language.
If it sounds natural and not monotonous like a robot, if the rhythm of the language matches
the content of the words, if the sound of the language is pleasing to the ear, then
it has good sentence fluency.
That includes a variety of things, like having varied sentence structure and not starting
too many sentences with the same words.
But one aspect of sentence fluency that is easily measured is the sentence lengths.
Let’s classify sentence lengths as short ones, like this,
medium ones like this,
and long ones like this one.
How short is short?
How long is long?
It all depends on the sentences surrounding them.
Right?
I mean, how tall is tall?
It depends.
But for this video, let’s arbitrarily say a short sentence is five or fewer words.
A long sentence can be considered two typed lines on a page, let’s say 25 words.
A medium sentence is anything between those two lengths.
If your sentences are all short, like this, your writing sounds choppy and halting.
“I saw Emma.
She was happy.
She had a dog.
I like dogs.
Doesn’t everyone like dogs?
Do you like dogs?
I like them.”
It sounds a little childish, like a little kid.
A series of short sentences isn’t pleasing to the ear, but it could serve a purpose,
like in these lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The two characters have just murdered the king and are afraid of getting found out.
(reading the lines)
The choppiness of the short lines makes it sound like they’re jumpy or scared,
which they are.
Using a lot of short lines can be a good way to convey tension or uncertainty.
If your sentences are all medium in length, and this is pretty common with student writers,
the rhythm gets kind of boring, like these from a guidebook to the Big Island of Hawaii
(reading the lines)
That’s fine, right?
Nothing wrong with that.
Medium length sentences are your basic drum beat.
They’re easy to read, get the job done and will probably make up more than half of all
your sentences in everyday writing.
Most of my sentences in this video are medium in length.
But if sentence fluency is like drumming, a series of medium length sentences is like
a steady rhythm like this one.
(steady beat)
But if the drummer does that for the whole song, like a drum machine, it gets
boring and repetitive.
Short sentences, on the other hand, are attention-getting and emphatic, like a flashy drum fill
between lines.
Like this one.
Here it comes. (drum fill)
That’s called a drum fill.
They get your attention.
You need both in a good song.
Next, long sentences.
If we want to stick with the drumming analogy, long sentences are like drum solos.
They demand the listener’s full attention with their complexity and expansiveness.
They can be impressive, but let’s face it, if a drum solo goes on too long, it gets tiring
and you forget what song they were playing in the first place.
Personally, I like very few drum solos, but I do like a long, elegant, and
grammatically correct sentence.
Here’s a long one from Hatchet, where a character is crashing a plane:
(reading lines)
That’s pretty long. That's 59 words.
Because long sentences require more focused attention, they slow the readers down and
draw them into the sentence’s train of thought.
The sentence demands that they hold the whole sentence in their minds from beginning to
end so that when it reaches the end, they can understand the complete idea being expressed.
They can’t read half-heartedly or too fast because they’ll lose focus or lose track
of what’s being said.
They may even have to stop and re-read it.
And because they’re putting all that focused energy into their reading, their minds are
fully engaged in the text.
In that Hatchet sentence, for example, I was forced to slow down and vividly imagine every
step of the plane crash, as if it was happening in slow motion.
And not to get all grammatical on you, but it has varied structure too.
It opens with an intentional fragment to really put you in the moment while it’s happening.
Fragments convey immediacy.
It’s a compound sentence that describes the motion of the plane, the directions that
it moved, then a phrase clarifying what it means by down, then some appositive phrases
that describe what the water was like.
It’s long but grammatically correct.
Another purpose of a long sentence is to slow the reader down to make them reflect on the
meaning of what they’re saying.
A writer might want the reader to pause and feel the beauty of the moment or to think
about what the whole narrative might mean.
On the other hand, if there are too many long sentences, it may stretch the reader’s patience
and he or she may lose the thread.
By the time the readers reach the end, they forget what the sentence was about
when it began.
Some academic texts I read in college were like that.
They seemed to think that long, complex sentences were good just because they were long
and complex.
I didn’t and still don’t think that’s good writing.
Now, let’s put them together.
Listen to these few sentences from James Baldwin’s story, “Sonny’s Blues.”
The narrator is watching jazz musicians play.
Creole is both the bass player and band leader and Sonny, on the piano,
is the narrator’s brother.
(reading lines)
That passage is a good example of sentence fluency.
It shows that good writing changes up the sentence lengths.
Use medium length sentences to establish a steady, easy-to-follow rhythm,
banging out a short sentence here and there
for emphasis or to set up the reader’s sense of anticipation,
and then use long sentences for depth, intensity, or expansiveness at an important
moment in the text.
Here’s a time index if you want to go back to rewatch something.
All right, that’s what you need to know about sentence fluency and
varying your sentence lengths.