I miss the days of true creative writing – you know, when you could write a real paragraph and your readers could keep up with the story. You didn’t have to throw in a bunch of pictures or short and squatty sentences so everyone could keep up. Yet the majority of readers today must be engaged with simple sentence structure – one liners. Many readers today simply struggle with attention spans. Sadly the age of overstimulation and silly social media has killed the average person’s attention span. Since attention spans are practically gone, mindless scanning and scrolling is now considered the “norm” rather than real reading.
People scroll to the point where even their thoughts are condensed. In fact, many times they won’t even stop to read a simple line unless there is a picture attached. Yet not everything in life needs to be dramatic, one-sentence-at-a-time writing. Whatever happened to people’s ability to make sense of a sentence and a story?
Personally I miss the complexity and the rhythm of reading a string of sentences. If being concise and catchy is the ultimate goal though – I still believe that it is achievable in long paragraphs if you know how to be playful with structure and language.
I simply find the one-line style exhausting. Every sentence has equal emphasis and is fed to you like you are a child. It’s not that I don’t like poetry with verse and stanzas. I do. But prose tells the story and explains the concept as it flows continuously, often arranged in paragraph form to broaden the mind and its concepts. The core function of the paragraph is to group similar ideas and provide hierarchy, but the loss of paragraphs makes writing one-dimensional and boring in my book. It is right up there with Dick and Jane books we read in kindergarten. “Look, Jane.” “We can read.” Can you? Or did I lose you a few paragraphs ago?
It’s not that we can’t mix in some short sentences, but don’t you miss long paragraphs? I do.
Believe it or not, people can read long, complete, drawn-out sentences. People can even read a whole darn paragraph that has two or even three sentences in it, which may seem to be a lot, but proves that the longer paragraph is still readable. See, you made it all the way to the end without dying of exhaustion, didn’t you? And it felt kind of good, like really reading again, like back when we were kids, when the days were long and the sun was bright overhead. We loved to lay out in the sun reading a juicy novel or magazine. We even drank water straight from the water hose outside and lived to tell about it. Tee hee My point is – please don’t fear the paragraph or punctuation. Even though I’m told to write in AP style in my columns and articles, I still love and miss all my commas – dashes – and most of all, exclamation points! And please don’t think you have to have a picture before you stop scrolling and start reading. Pick up the newspaper or a good book and get back to real reading.
We crave diversity in life. We admire it. Glorify it, even. So, what about diversity in writing? What about creative differences? Why must we limit ourselves to short and simple structures? Why can’t our sentences run like a river if our paragraphs carry enough healthy weight, and our punctuation includes semi-colons, colons, and good old dashes as many as we want?
These are the true “prose” and cons of writing. And in my personal opinion I think we need more long form content and should be able to start sentences with coordinating conjunctions as well, because after all, that’s how my mind thinks – like one run-on sentence. Yes, my mind is constantly connecting words and phrases and often singing a crazy tune or two to remember things as I get older. Hence why my late 92-year-old grandmother loved poetry and nursery rhymes because it made her mind think back to something she had read and learned 90 years prior. She loved to recite those children’s nursery rhymes from long ago – like this one: “Pease porridge hot. Pease porridge cold. Pease porridge in the pot nine days old.” Ironically the older we get, the simpler the mind gets and returns to its childhood days. But my grandmother devoured every book she could ever get her hands on, including my father’s college books on chemistry. Everything she learned was because she read and re-read chapters and articles with just an eighth grade education but a mind that was sharp until the day she went to heaven. The beauty was in the journey and loving to learn something new every day and it still is today. I love reading about interesting people and places and I love long-winded writers who engage my mind and provoke my thoughts. It’s still the “prose” that enlightens my soul and there are never any cons when one learns to read and reads to learn.
