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A 259-Word Sentence — Really?
During the Christmas holidays, I picked up an issue of The New Yorker (12/17/18), and I read a short story entitled “Time for the Eyes to Adjust” by Linn Ullmann. The story described an interesting relationship between the narrator and her father, but the specific feature that stood out was the 259-word sentence near the end of the story.
As a long-time writing instructor, I’ve often assigned one-page descriptive essays (12-point font and double spaced) to my students. Typically, those essays include roughly 250–300 words. So technically, this one sentence by Ullmann could have met my essay requirement. Amazing — right? Yet, needless to say, I’ve never had a student submit a one-sentence essay. Still, this particularly long sentence does raise the question: what should be the maximum word count for a sentence today?
Based on my almost 40 years of grading papers, I would guesstimate that most student sentences are between 15 and 25 words, but I’ve never mandated a particular range. In our class discussions, I suggest to my students that they find a length that fits what they’re trying to say without trying to cram too much information into one sentence.
