Serious question.
Why did colonial writers, and pretty much seemingly everyone from that time period, consistently use extremely long run-on sentences?
I'm reading Wealth of Nations and it's almost a chore to maintain the mental effort to get through a half-page-long sentence and understand it. But in a way, I kind of like it, it's almost rewarding, but I can't figure out how or why.
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So I found this,
english.stackexchange.com
Which all but confirms it. But really tho, why? I notice when I've had a bunch of coffee I'll write longer-form ideas into run-on sentences; was it maybe because everyone was smoking tons of tobacco back then, and that stimulation had a result of lengthening their writing?
I wonder specifically in the context of ideas like the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and what differences in colonial peoples' mental state and way of living back then affected their writing in such a broad and yet consistent way.
Bamp.
Has no one else noticed this?
People had longer attention spans.
>But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
Think why MLK might've made this one sentence. That's my exercise for you.
LIberals invented ADD
>be in 10th grade English class
>our teacher gives us a 10 minute lecture on how not to write sentences, telling us that run on sentences are bad
>"OK....now pull out A Tale of Two Cities, let's continue with chapter 7...."
>book is literally riddled with sentences that sometimes go on for half a page, paragraphs that last 4 pages, semicolons and shit everywhere
>the novel is a complete mess and violated nearly rule he just said, yet it's considered a classic and sold millions of copies
Probably the moment I realized that if you want to actually learn something, you won't learn it in school.
This is just a guess. I would say that it's because they were writing with a pen on paper. A word processor lets you trim your sentences and even a later model typewriter helps edit as you write. When you write with a pen there is a tendency to make small adjustments in meaning by running the sentence longer.
so that women and blacks and gays and trans and latinx couldn't get ahead because they were associated with grocery lists which are short
Hm good idea user, I didn't think about that but that actually makes sense
I think it's essentially this, in an understanding on the writer's part that they wouldn't necessarily be writing for the lay person but one likely acquainted with the 'classics' and/or had the capacity to parse through winding clauses. There are probably examples though in that period that subverts this and Hume's Treatise of Human Nature comes to mind the lengths he went towards comprehensibility, but even then.
It's just a necessary trend that lay people lower the common denominator. To draw out an analogy, it's why academic music gave way to popular music.
The intended audience weren't brainlets.
Guess that was the fashion back then to make it seem literary. Thomas Mann is terrible with it, Proust
>artistic writing doesn't read like standard prose
that's the point of it
It's more likely that shorter sentences are simply easier to understand and quicker to read. Evolution in action.
Or, we have gotten better are condensing thoughts into smaller chunks.
If may seem counter intuitive, but the fact that our sentences are now shorter, may actually be a sign of rising IQs and not lowering ones. If we can understand things more quickly, then you don't need as long sentences. Oftentimes you will find that if you read really long passages from hundreds of years ago, the writers seem to take a long time to explain rather simple concepts.
Just what they were accustomed to. Like you find it odd because you're accustomed to something else. Things change.
This, check out Carr's The Shallows and Baron's Words Onscreen and throw out your computer before you destroy your brain and become unable to finish the meme trilogy.
>money
People got paid per word, so why wouldn't you go all longwinded?
>editing
Trimming and minimalism takes a lot more work even now.
>writing ability
People were a lot worse at getting their point across.
>readers ability
And the readers were a lot worse at getting it. Try introduce a relative complex idea to a normal person, the more ignorant they are, the more explaining you need to do.
>it was easier to tolerate
Books were a lot more valuable and people couldn't buy a new one every time they finished with one, so long-windedness was tolerated much more. What the fuck else is the person going to do with their time, fight some incurable disease?
It's not like it was a classic because of this shit but despite it, and it's not like you could get away with that shit now unless you were famous, nor it's not like they teach you how to write novels. So yeah, good job failing to get 10th grade English.
There has been a deliberate attempt to dumb down language and, like another poster said, simplify the message along with the way in which it's conveyed so that non-whites can participate. The people saying it's because we are getting smarter or more efficient are retarded. Average IQ is dropping throughout the west due to the importation of brown people who can be funneled through our dumbed down education system, get by reading Bless Me Ultima bullshit, and establish a facade of equity so that jewish elites will be able to safely rule over a pardo-like underclass of medium IQ mulatto wage slaves with no sense of identity who will be docile consumers. That some actually think short, simple sentence literature is in any way an improvement highlights that we are in full-on 'ignorance is strength, slavery is freedom' mode.
Writing fashions and conventions differ by time and place.
or that the ideas that people have today are really simplistic
>run-on sentences
A run-on sentence is not just a long sentence. A sentence can be as long as possible but still be grammatically correct if you use a correct mix of conjunctions and punctuation. In my opinion, the reason for it is because people back then read more and read more challenging literature and generally had longer attention-spans.
The example you posted is not a run-on sentence.
An educated person used to know Latin which uses long sentences and many clauses. This is what they were used to reading and so this is how they wrote. Sentences have been getting shorter ever since.