I am fine with long sentences. A small story to go with that:
A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a book of fairytales to my little one. The book was rather old, around some 100 years and in Gothic print (Fraktur letters) which was the standard in Germany at the time. But without doubt, it was intended as small-child fare by its very nature.
It struck me, that the sentences were very long by today's standards. Much longer than what you find in most contemporary novels for grown ups. The complexity of the sentences was higher in the same way.
Obviously, this was not an issue at the time and - more importantly - thought fitting for children.
As it happens, yesterday when we talked about movies, my wife told me that she remembered a scene of "War and Pease" (after Tolstoy's novel), in which the actors had a dialogue of five minutes without a single cut. This stands in stark contrast to anything that you will find in any movie today. In a dialogue - which is highly unlikely to ever last even close to five minutes - there are countless cuts. In fact, bytimes so many cuts that there would simply be not enough time to fit in anything beyond most simple sentences. This flurry of cuts is, not even regarding the unbearable amount of commercials, why I have almost ceased to watch TV or movies. They can't tell a story any more, they are reduced to presenting a row of 'effects'.
Why do I bring this up?
I wish to illustrate in which extent the chase for our attention has led to ever more stimuli in ever shorter intervals. Commercials first, movies second, the written word and language last.
I daresay the contemporary style of writing and talking would have been considered that of simpletons by the standards of a mere century ago, in which you would not even have addressed children in the fairy tale age that way.
Of course, style and language is always subject to change and fashion. I believe, though, that the evermore desperate attempts for our attention with ever more stimuli at ever shorter intervals is not beneficial. They deteriorate the capability of the individual and society to concentrate. Newspaper articles get ever shorter because people won't read anything any more which is beyond a certain length. People would not consider a book, which is written too 'complicated'. Computergames, Tinder, whatever you want - the trend is towards instant gratification.
It seems to be somewhat of a downward vicious circle.
The danger I see is this:
Life is not simple. You cannot explain many things with sentences made merely of subject, verb, object. At the same time, if one cannot cope with sentences beyond subject, verb, object, one will not be able to grasp many important things in life. Of course, I am intentionally overstating a bit to make my point stand out.
If you never train to cope with things beyond the very simple, you will not learn it.
If you have never learned to cope with things beyond the very simple, you will look for others to 'do it for you'.
If you are dependent on others to do things for you which you don't grasp, you can be sure to be taken advantage of by those that can.
Ultimately, this is harmful for equality and justice in society. A look into politics should teach us:
For any difficult, complex and challenging question, there is at least one clear, simple, easy to understand, and wrong answer.
Therefore, I make a stand for
not trying to make things ever more simple in an attempt to retain our attention.
Instead, I advocate to take up the challenge to understand things complicated, because I am convinced that we are in dire need to train this. If children one hundred years ago were up to the task, so should we.
That said, again, I am fine with long sentences.
von Marwitz