From: mike
Subject: A long sentence I liked
Date: March 2, 2007 4:50:28 PM EST
To: rclark@poynter.org
Cc: XXXXXXX
Hi Roy,
I just read your Writing Tip about long sentences, in which you quoted Proulx -- here's one I liked from Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, which I read recently. Thought you might like it too.
"They rode the horses at a gallop and they rode them at a trot and the horses were hot and lathered and squartted and stamped in the road and the campesinos afoot in the road with baskets of gardenstuff or pails covered with cheesecloth would press to the edge of the road or climb through the roadside brush and cactus to watch wide eyed the young horsemen on their horses passing and the horses mouthing froth and champing and the riders calling to one another in their alien tongue and passing in a muted fury that seemed scarcely to be contained in the space allotted them and yet leaving all unchanged where they had been: dust, sunlight, a singing bird."
Not even a comma for 115 words, then a colon and a list of three things (another device you've written about). I just love the way the sentence charges on and then culminates in those three elements, just as the scene it describes does.
Mike Janssen
Posted by nedlog at March 2, 2007 6:32 PM | TrackBack