A Short Defense of the Long Sentence

The advice to 'write short sentences' is useful until it becomes a tic — a way of sounding decisive without doing the harder work of actually finishing a thought. A long sentence, built carefully, can hold a whole argument's worth of qualification and still land cleanly, because the reader is being walked through the reasoning rather than handed conclusions in isolation. The goal was never brevity. It was clarity — and those aren't always the same instruction.