There is no law that says you can't write 200+ word sentences outside of English class.

(But I get the idea...)

I did consider sending them off to an underwater place without scuba equipment, but then decided that was a bit too much. Don't worry, the Sahara is perfectly horrible enough, as it will cause the mud to cake on everything and then turn into dusty stuff. I think.

My teacher is having us write a "multi-media" paper, which employs over 8 different types of writing. It appears that the odder the method of writing, the better.

So maybe if we have an Escher room or a ee cummings room, I'll be dropping in...

I actually like that book. By someone-or-other White, yes?

However, I see that if you've already read the book, re-reading it out loud could become tedious.

There are some excellent, really fantastic authors who make great use of such long sentences, and I promise you this, they do not turn up only in bad writing or in high school and college literature.

It's really close minded for you to say that, since if you think that long sentences like that only pop up in those contexts, you need to read more, because while styles come and go, writing off works that have extremely long sentences in them as being only bad writing or the focus of high school and college classes is simply incorrect; even then, you see, there's a massively wide variation, especially once you hit university where thinking in terms of 'books I read in class that I would never read otherwise'- which is what you've implied there, with that statement of yours- is false because schools with a wide swath of writing classes or English classes have such a wide variety to them, to the point that in one semester alone I read (for three different classes, mind) Roberto Bolano's Amulet, John Milton's Paradise Lost, William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness; I could have, if I wanted, taken a course on modern fiction, or get into a YA literature class, but then I would've had to have read Stephanie Meyer's Twilight*- which would also be considered 'college literature' due to its use in an upper level setting as something to read and examine (which on its own sorts out the illusion that 'high school and college literature' are things no average person would ever be caught reading).**

Here's a brilliant long sentence (in its passage, for sake of some context) from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West***:

Already you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding-veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with the old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hillarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet that the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.


That main sentence, and what it's supposed to show, has been burned into my mind**** for over six years now.







*Yes, Twilight is now considered something acceptable to read and analyze in university in a class for credit and a grade and not for fun.
**253 words, ladies, gentlemen, and starfish.
***Please do not read if you are overly sensitive to violence. Or a lack of quotation marks for speech. Or a lack of apostrophes for contractions. Or hoping for nice things to happen. No, seriously.
****No red hot brands involved.