The other day I was teaching style in writing and, as usual, a student said she was told not to write long sentences because readers can no longer follow a long sentence (did you follow that?).
After defending the long sentence--how it’s a container for rhythm, sound, images, and possibly mimetic of the content--I said readers yearn to experience a different sense of time. I said something about busyness, the feeling of being overwhelmed by the world’s events, the bombardment of endless information, scrolling, emails. Our nervous systems are not designed for the onslaught.
But after class, I felt I left something out. Something critical. Then I listened to Ezra Klein’s conversation with Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, and, more recently, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. Wolf added the missing piece to my reference to time and narration.
The term “reading” is misleading because it suggests singularity; as if there is only one category called reading. In fact, reading is a process and there are two significant ways to read. All of this is relevant, I think, not only to the writer who has been told not to write long sentences but also to the practice of what we do here, of looking closely, in granular detail, at a single sentence.
In the digital age, most people read on a screen and have learned to skim the surface of text. Wolf calls this decoding—putting vision and language together to gather information. It’s the basic level of reading. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, calls it, as his title suggests, the “shallows.”
There are benefits to decoding or the shallows. It enhances the speed of reading, as well as the consumption of vast amounts of information. But if this is the only type of reading you do, because of the plasticity of the brain, you are rewiring your neurons and synapses to skim. This, I think, is behind the idea that people cannot read long sentences. Or maybe they can, but they skim them, breeze right over at lightning speed.
“Many, many of us have, if you will, regressed to that earliest form of reading,” said Wolf on the podcast, “in which we are barely skimming the surface of what we read, barely consolidating it in memory, and we are, in fact, reading less of what is there as a result.”
There is another way to read and it’s deep reading. An MRI of the brain of someone engaged in deep reading shows the entire brain is lit up. The full circuitry is glowing, which means using your background knowledge to infer, to deduce the truth value, to feel what that author is feeling in a work of fiction, and to understand a completely different perspective, ie the theory of mind. Attention, concentration, and insights are not diminished but enhanced. When we read deeply, we make new neural connections and those are the basis of new thought. As Proust noted, the heart of reading is the place where we go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover our own.
Let me bring it back to what we’re doing. We are doing a form of deep reading, peering as if through a microscope at the inner life of a sentence, its bones and blood. When we look this closely and read this slowly, we see more, understand more, intuit more: how did the sentence create speed? Anxiety? Joy? Abundance? A melodic tone? A jarring tone?
Wolf says if you practice slow reading for 10 or 20 minutes a day, you can develop biliteracy. You’ll have the ability to scan when you need to consume, let’s say, the newspaper headlines for the day. You’ll also have the ability to read and concentrate and think. Those seem pretty valuable skills for a writer and a reader.
This practice, then, sentence by sentence, word by word, is deep reading that is changing your brain in a wonderful way. A way toward concentration, attention, and thinking, and, ultimately, writing.
All the books of the world will not bring you happiness, but build a secret path toward your heart.—Hermann Hesse
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
About Me:
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007. Painters have paint; sculptors have clay. We have words, and words are sounds, and if you pay close attention to this, you can make music.
Please visit my website to find all of my books: ninaschuyler.com, including my novel Afterword, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
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I’m so happy that my short story collection, In This Ravishing World, will be published in July 2024. The collection won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature.
Nine connected stories unfold, bringing together an unforgettable cast of dreamers, escapists, activists, and artists, creating a kaleidoscopic view of the climate crisis. An older woman who has spent her entire life fighting for the planet sinks into despair. A young boy is determined to bring the natural world to his bleak urban reality. A scientist working to solve the plastic problem grapples with whether to have a child. A ballet dancer tries to inhabit the consciousness of a rat. It’s a full-throated chorus, with Nature joining in, marveling at the exquisite beauty of our world, and pleading, raging, and ultimately urging everyone toward activism and resistance.
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I say it's better to be read deeply by one person than skimmed by a hundred. In the kitchen, the slow food movement is gaining traction; people are increasingly finding value in food that is rooted in culture and history, food that often takes a long time to make and is meant to be savored. Now we need a slow book movement. We need books that are actual physical objects, books that are carried around and read and reread over the course of a lifetime. My mom taught me that "everybody else is doing it" is not an excuse for shoddy anything, so I'm not about to take a fast train to quasi-literacy now just because it's popular. Resist, brave writers, resist!
I have felt this change in myself. I’m “following” so many good writers but I find I will only “scroll” 2-3 times and then I lose interest. I don’t like it about myself but being self aware is a start. I can see the triangle of parenting, menopause, and getting COVID twice causing some of the focus issue. But I am encouraged that neuro plasticity means I can work to change it. I forget sometimes that Nathaniel Hawthorne was my favorite author in high school/college -- I loved the 3 page sentence. I hold out hope that I can get back to enjoying that deep reading of complex, nourishing sentences.