Читать книгу Collins Improve Your Punctuation - Graham King - Страница 8

A question that crops up with astonishing regularity is, ‘How long should a sentence be?’ The usual answer is, neither too long nor too short. A sensible approach is to regard short sentences as more easily understood than long, complicated ones, but an endless succession of staccato sentences can be irritating to the reader. It really comes down to judgment. Careful writers will ‘hear’ their work as they proceed; that way the sentences will form themselves into a logical, interesting, economical and, with luck, elegant flow of thought.

Here’s a piece of prose that’s more a form of mental torture than sentence:

A person shall be treated as suffering from physical disablement such that he is either unable to walk or virtually unable to do so if he is not unable or virtually unable to walk with a prosthesis or an artificial aid which he habitually wears or uses or if he would not be unable or virtually unable to walk if he habitually wore or used a prosthesis or an artificial aid which is suitable in his case.

That is a grammatical sentence written by someone expecting it to be understood, but it defies understanding. Yet what it is trying to say is something very simple and which can be unambiguously expressed in our ideal sentence, ‘complete in thought and construction’:

Persons are regarded as physically disabled if they always need an artificial aid to walk.

As you can see, sentences can be grammatical without making any sense. The linguist Noam Chomsky proved this by forming a chain of words that bore the least logical relationship with each other: Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. The words make no sense but it is a well-formed sentence complete with verb.