Aaaaah. Has anyone else ever written an overlong sentence that capered and cavorted without ever seeming to come to a conclusion and, in the end, even started to cause confusion about what was even meant by it in the first place, or known someone who has?
Poor written expression is de rigueur. Well, not if you’re a student, but if you’re a tenured world-famous professor it seems to abruptly become mandatory for some reason.
My brother will have entire run-on sentences that will end suddenly without so much as a hint of what the predicate would have been. Oh, and the way his voice is when he ends them makes you think he’s only pausing in the middle of a sentence rather than ending them. Schmuck.
I have, at certain times throughout my life, written, in a somewhat obfuscated fashion, and to my fevered chagrin, sentences, which while syntactically valid, are in fact (as a matter of my own and my colleague’s opinions) far too long, but not on purpose.
Man, you guys have it easy. I just had to digest a six page essay by MM Bahktin, who decided to make some completely loopy point about deep linguistic theory by forsaking complete sentences. It was six pages of really dense serious theory that read like a prose poem written by hallucinating person picking words at random out from a language theory text and adding a lot in the translation.