A Really Long Sentence That Ends With Food
On right and left-branching sentences
Branches of government, branches of science, branches of knowledge—a common phrase we use to describe the subdivisions that grow from a central trunk. The same is true of sentences, which “grow” from their main clause, branching either to the left or to the right. This depends on where the independent clause appears and how you introduce detail and stack information.
Most sentences start with the subject and move onto the verb:
Dogs howl at the moon.
This branches to the right. But sometimes you want to introduce a sentence with a phrase that lets us know where or when something happens. Then it’s left-branching:
On lonely winter nights, dogs howl at the moon.
A prepositional phrase—anything that lets the reader know when or where something happens (In the year of the cat… After the dog days of summer…)—when placed at the beginning of a sentence, delays the impact of primary information.
If you prefer to set the stage before letting the actors do stuff, then you write one of these left-branching sentences. Sometimes it’s just a rhythmic decision. You might want a little variety. If you keep branching to the right your sentences will sound repetitive. Best to mix it up.
From Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
Somewhere in the Bronx, in a wooded alcove set well off the street, Maeve found a small bar-and-grill that was willing to serve the funeral party of forty-seven medium-rare roast beef and boiled potatoes and green beans amandine, with fruit salad to begin and vanilla ice cream to go with the coffee.
This is the first sentence in a novel, and it does a good job of setting the stage. Like all sentences, it has an arc, it tells a story in brief. Something happens–Maeve found a small bar-and-grill. Did your eye catch that? That’s the primary information, the central pillar or trunk, the independent clause. It has a subject and a verb. Sometimes it has an object or complement. Everything else is embroidery. You can make your sentences as richly embroidered as you like, as Ed Perlman used to say—and as Alice McDermott did. It’s a judgment call, an aesthetic decision, but one with dramatic potential.
Here are some other ways McDermott might have written the sentence:
Left-branching
Somewhere in the Bronx, in a wooded alcove set well off the street, Maeve found a small bar-and-grill.
The object of the verb ends the sentence. Meaning is conveyed. We can move on with our lives. But we might have to start a new sentence about the place if we want to use all that detail we left out. Maybe starting a new sentence devoted to the place might break paragraph unity. Best to stick with Maeve and what she’s doing.
Right-branching
Maeve found a small bar-and-grill somewhere in the Bronx, in a wooded alcove set well off the street that was willing to serve the funeral party of forty-seven medium-rare roast beef and boiled potatoes and green beans amandine, with fruit salad to begin and vanilla ice cream to go with the coffee.
This has a cumulative effect, building on and on with detail that branches wildly to the right. To my ears this one sounds off balance, it becomes unwieldy and tedious.
Here are two more examples from the same novel:
Abruptly, before Maeve could say another word, the priest asked us all to say a Rosary with him, understanding (of course) that there was only so much more that could be said, that the repetitiveness of the prayers, the hushed drone of repeated, and by its numbing repetition, nearly wordless, supplication, was the only antidote, tonight, for Maeve’s hopelessness.
Can you find the independent clause, the priest asked us? Everything else is embroidery, decoration.
The others parked up along the drive, first along one side, then the other, the members of the funeral party walking in their fourth procession of the day (the first had been out of the church, the second and third in and out of the graveyard), down the wet and rutted path to the little restaurant that, lacking only draught Guinness and a peat fire, might have been a pub in rural Ireland.
The subject is “others.” The verb is “parked.” Everything else is a prepositional phrase that describes where (and a little bit of why). It has a cumulative effect.
Generally, the reader wants to get on with it, and a long sentence can slow them down. Which is why you don’t want to add detail after the punchline of a joke.
Suddenly, something happened!
It's usually best to narrate intense action with simple sentences. Complex sentences (especially right-branching) can change emphasis and confuse or lessen impact. Sometimes the action or the thing we want emphasized gets clouded by too many phrases.
She went to dial her mom’s number again when a loud crash from outside interrupted her train of thought, the dog jumping from her arms and scurrying away.
The dog scurrying away kind of takes away from the loud crash that I heard a moment ago. If the sentence ended on “thought” we could find out whatever that was and get on with it. We might see the dog scurry away in our rush to the window.
As they turned another corner, a blood-curdling scream filled the air as a skeleton’s fingers latched onto her ankles.
There are essentially two surprises in this sentence. The blood-curdling scream is the independent clause. There should probably be a period after that because the skeleton’s fingers latching onto her ankles gets deemphasized (using “as a…” it winds up being subordinated).
The suspense sentence
Left-branching introductions can delay the impact and even give a “slow-mo” effect.
Taking careful aim and swinging like she was going for the bleachers, she punched him right in the nose.
We get taking and swinging (the -ing verb endings are important here) before the independent clause and main verb punched. And we land on the nose (as does her fist). We might like this and want to add more to it, see how far we can stretch that left-branching introduction, delaying impact to increase anticipation…
Raising her hand from her side where it had been hidden from view, she balled her fist, stepped forward—using all her weight as her father had taught her--and landed a right hook squarely on the man's nose. He fell.
We still end on nose for maximum impact (he-he) but now we have three active verbs balled, stepped, landed. It has more complexity.
Speaking of sentences that end on the nose, the following sentence delays impact by adding a relative clause (which…). The result? The silly realization that this woman’s nose, the nose in general, is prized above all other features by English men.
From “On Guard” by Evelyn Waugh:
The feature which, more than any other, endeared her to sentimental Anglo-Saxon manhood was her nose.
Using the long right branching sentence with a relative “which” clause can delay a punchline, keep the reader in suspense, and add comic effect. Here’s an example that branches left and right:
From Uneasy Money by P.G. Wodehouse
At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.
Suspense can be engineered into the syntax to help build a physiological connection to the action. For instance, how do you convey anticipation? Here Frederick Exley is witnessing the long-awaited arrival of “the famous writer,” i.e. Norman Mailer:
From Pages from a Cold Island by Frederick Exley:
Then the procession began, and in its ritualistic majesty it made the National Institute of Arts and Letters ceremony look like a thing of scant consequence, as pale as the talc hue of the great Stokowski's head. All together there must have been a dozen or fifteen of them — even including a priest I assumed was going to bless Norman's cauliflower — and as they filed behind me I noticed there was something utterly pilgrimatic or apostolic in their demeanors, that try as they would to glide nonchalantly by they were quite overcome by a ludicrous earnestness, a stealthy determined sense of importance, a kind of wait-till-you-see-who's-behind-me thing. And finally, a full thirty seconds — and what a theatrical effect this delay had — after the final disciple, He came!
The art of arriving fashionably late presented in a form that lets you feel the impact of that theatrical effect. Now take a look at his impression of meeting Mailer.
He was, as people had so often told me, very much the gentleman (though with equal sincerity I'd heard as many stories about what, if true, could only be deemed a strident cruelty), speaking in a very low-keyed voice weirdly compounded by the staccato word-biting of the born Brooklynite, as though his vocal cords, quite independently of anything he was willing, were attempting the impossible feat of staying attuned to his acutely febrile cerebrum.
There is a cumulative effect that leads us to the most interesting detail—that his brain is trying to keep up with his mouth. This brings me to my next point—accumulating detail as a means of suspense. Here is one more from Exley’s autobiographical novel in which he is stalking yet another writer. Parking outside Edmund Wilson’s house, he offers a string of descriptive details that paint a picture of upstate New York, sweeping like a camera eye across the landscape toward the distant mountains and evoking a haunting sense of place:
No car stood on the lawns. The grass grew long in the yards. The house looked battened down and bleak; but it was a beautiful day in early autumn, the colors were splendid, the morning's autumnal mists had lifted, the sky was high, an exhilarating, heady blue, and way off to the east one could see-as was not always the case—the finely defined purple outlines of the majestic Adirondacks.
Accumulation
The “cumulative sentence” piles on detail after detail, often with parallel structure, slowly bringing the picture into focus—and sometimes leading to a surprise or punchline. This kind of sentence branches wildly to the right.
From A Pelican at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse
Under her regime dinner would have meant dressing and sitting down, probably with a lot of frightful guests, to a series of ghastly dishes with French names, and fuss beyond belief if one happened to swallow one’s front shirt stud and substituted for it a brass paper-fastener.
The “paper-fastener” lands at the end of a wildly right branching sentence, one which piles detail on to the infinitive object compliment (“to a series of ghastly dishes…”). The very specific hypothetical of someone swallowing the button off their shirt and putting a paperclip in its place is a surprising comic image.
The last word
In a sentence, the last word tends to get emphasis. It lingers in the reader’s mind and directs thought.
When he looked into her eyes, time stood still.
Time stood still when he looked into her eyes.
By reversing the order, we change the possibilities for how the paragraph might develop:
When he looked into her eyes, time stood still. There was no future, no past; only the present moment, and he wanted to live in that moment forever…
Time stood still when he looked into her eyes. They were the color of a lake he had visited with his family as a child, the same dark depth that attracted him to go out past the buoys, way out where he knew he wasn’t supposed to go…
Maximum impact
Complex sentences can lose impact if the thing the writer reveals is subordinated. Don’t mess up the punchline or ruin the surprise.
When she opened the door, she saw a man with a hook.
She saw a man with a hook when she opened the door.
This is a surprising moment in a story. It should have impact. Where do you see the hook most clearly? In the first sentence. It’s emphasized by landing at the end. In the second version it’s forgotten by the time we get to the end. It also doesn’t follow a natural chronological order. Sometimes this happens in a draft. Try to catch and correct it when editing.
Logic and clarity
Usually, you just want to order information so that it will be clear to your reader. It depends on what you want to say. In each of the following something different is emphasized? Same information, but a shift in focus.
You’re either emphasizing everything (1) or depth (2) or length (3):
The river is 60 miles long, and it averages 50 yards in width, and its depth averages 8 feet.
The river, which is 60 miles long and averages 50 yards in width, has an average depth of 8 feet.
The river is 60 miles long. It averages 50 yards in width and 8 feet in depth.
The writer leads the reader by the hand and shows them this and then this… Like poets, prose writers should also pay attention to word order and rhythm. One way to do that is to move modifiers around. Use them to change the rhythm and flavor of your sentences.
You might begin with a modifier:
Tossing her cupcake on the table, she ran into the bathroom.
You could squeeze one into the middle of a sentence:
The final episode, a sickeningly sweet melodrama, lasted two-and-a-half hours.
Or you could end with one:
She looked at the illustrated menu, her eyes reflecting the hunger of a starved woman.
Prompt 1: Revise a paragraph so that you have at least one right- and one left-branching sentence. Try to have a mix of simple, complex, and compound sentences.
Prompt 2: Write a suspense sentence that uses left-branching detail in parallel modifiers to delay a piece of information (a surprise or punchline).
Prompt 3: Write a punchline that uses a right-branching sentence to get more and more ridiculous—saving the most hilarious word until the end.