Lodewijk Muns

Short curves

Difficult? More than three words. In a row.
Rather irritating? Those half sentences. Cut to pieces.

Someone in the staff of the Dutch television news has had the luminous idea that the average sentence is too complex for the listener. I’m not talking about complex sentences: even a simple subject-predicate sentence is too difficult when it exceeds a four or five word limit.

There seems to be a misunderstanding here: that complexity is directly correlated with length.

If a sentence. Is too long. Simply insert. A full stop.

That a sentence becomes simpler by being cut to pieces is, evidently, nonsense. In speech, a sentence is audibly shaped by prosodic means: the colon makes the voice rise, we linger a little at the comma’s, and round off with a downward inflection. Even without catching a word the listener will understand how the sentence is structured.

But those short sentences. All in the same voice. Without shape.
Monotonous, innit! – And pathetic. Boring.

This has nothing to do with the difference between written and spoken language: in ordinary speech too we apply the whole range of punctuation and all sorts of subtle nuances which point out where a sentence is heading, what is primary, what secondary. Written punctuation is merely a pale reflection of spoken prosody.

A written text will come to life in the reader by inner hearing; involuntarily she adds prosody. We may even have the feeling we hear the author’s voice. But maybe there are readers who hear nothing; and maybe this is the cause of the misunderstanding that comprehensibility depends on sentence length.

Messing about. With mother’s tongue. Dutch pride & joy.

Lodewijk Muns composer, author, pianist