Defoe’s original is a fairly long sentence by any standards. Now try this sentence for size:
‘But ––– !’
This one appears to defy everything we think we know about sentences, but it is a valid sentence just the same, as you will see when it is placed in its correct context:
Jane turned abruptly from the window and faced him with blazing eyes.
‘Well, you’ve finally done it! You realise we’re all ruined, don’t you? Don’t you!’
‘But –––!’ Harry was squirming. Speechless. He stepped back in an attempt to evade the next onslaught.
It never came. Instead, weeping uncontrollably, Jane collapsed on to the settee.
You can see that ‘But ––– !’, short though it is, quite adequately expresses a response and an action in the context of the middle paragraph (a paragraph can consist of one or more sentences with a common theme). Despite its seeming incompleteness, it is nevertheless a sentence of a kind, although some grammarians would label it a sentence fragment. Here are some more:
Her expression conveyed everything. Disaster. Ruin. Utter ruin.
Three of the four sentences here are sentence fragments. They’re perfectly legitimate, but use them for emphasis only, and with care.
The long-winded sentence
Another kind of sentence, and one to avoid, is seen rather too often. Typically, it is rambling and unclear, usually the result of having too many ideas and unrelated thoughts jammed into it, like this one:
He said that the agreement would galvanise a new sense of opportunity and partnership between the countries and enable them to articulate the targets with regard to inflation, set by economically enlightened governments, which was always of great concern to every family in the European Union.
Would you really bother to try to unravel that sentence? No, life is too short, and that sentence is most likely destined to remain unread, its author’s voice deservedly unheard. That’s the price you pay for writing bad sentences. To demonstrate how the inclusion of irrelevant matter can cloud the intent and meaning of a sentence, consider this example:
Jonathan Yeats, whose family moved to the United States from Ireland in the late 1950s, and who later married a Mormon girl from Wisconsin, wrote the novel in less than three months.
We are bound to ask, what has the novelist’s family to do with his writing a book in record time? Did the Mormon girl help him? Did his marriage inspire him to write like a demon? If not, why mention these facts? By the time we’ve reached the important part of the sentence – the fact that he wrote the book in less than three months – our attention has been ambushed by two extraneous thoughts.
American presidents are notorious for irrelevant rambling. The tradition began, apparently, with President Harding, of whom, when he died in 1923, a wit observed, ‘The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.’ A sample:
I have the good intention to write you a letter ever since you left, but the pressure of things has prevented, speeches to prepare and deliver, and seeing people, make a very exacting penalty of trying to be in politics.
But we must not grieve over Harding when we have former US president George Bush gamely carrying the national flag of gobbledegook:
I mean a child that doesn’t have a parent to read to that child or that doesn’t see that when the child is hurting to have a parent and help out or neither parent there enough to pick the kid up and dust him off and send him back into the game at school or whatever, that kid has a disadvantage.
Well, enough of warnings. The point to remember is that although a sentence may be as long as a piece of string, long sentences may land you in trouble. A good sentence will be no longer than necessary, but this doesn’t mean that you should chop all your sentences to a few words. That would be boring. To keep the reader alert and interested you need variety. If you examine this paragraph, for example, you’ll find a sentence sequence that goes short/long/long/short/medium/long/medium. It’s not meant to be a model, but it aims in the right direction.
When a sentence isn’t a sentence
Here are some constructions that aren’t regarded as ‘proper’ sentences:
Are unable to fill any order within 21 days.
Date for the closing of.
Thinking it an excellent opportunity.
Clearly, there’s something wrong with these. What is wrong is that these examples do not make sense. Nor are they in any context that would help them to make sense. They are incomplete because they are ungrammatical and do not express a thought or an action or carry any recognisable information. It has nothing to do with length, either; the following examples are extremely short but are grammatical and convey the intended information in such a way as to be unambiguous:
‘Taxi!’ ONE WAY Stop! Amount Due ‘Damn!’
‘Leaving already?’
Sentences are so versatile they can be confusing, so this might be a good time to take a closer look at the inner workings of the sentence. Despite the demonstration that even single-word ‘sentences’ can make sense, let’s concentrate on what we might call a ‘classic’ sentence.
The inner workings of the classic sentence
Try to think of a sentence as a combination of two units:
The subject – What it is
The predicate – what we’re saying about it
Here are some simple examples:
| SUBJECT | PREDICATE |
| My | word! |
| Your book | is over there. |
| Dr Smith | will see you tomorrow. |
The subject of a sentence does not have to precede the predicate. Every day we’ll read hundreds of sentences in which the predicate precedes the subject:
| PREDICATE | SUBJECT |
| It gradually became apparent that it was | the odour of death. |
| Over the horizon appeared | an immense armada. |
Sometimes the subject of a sentence can be buried, or at least disguised. What are the subjects in these sentences?
| A | How many more times must we do this long journey? |
| B | You should see how my friend Jeremy deals with pushy salesmen. |
| C | Take this load of rubbish to the shop for a refund. |
A is what is called an interrogative sentence which often transposes subject and predicate. If you think carefully about this example you’ll probably conclude that the only possible candidate for the subject is we (We