Grammar Girl here, I'm in Yon Fokrty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. A few weeks

ago we talked about how long a paragraph should be, and now today we're going to talk about

how long a sentence should be. And I'm going to give you a way to remember the difference

between the two incredibly tricky spellings of the word cord. This first segment is by Bonnie Mills.

My dad has a memorable poster in his bathroom, a diagram of a ridiculously long sentence by Marcel

Proust. It's from his masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past, also translated as In Search of Lost Time.

And it starts like this. Their honor precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until

the discovery of their crime, their position unstable, dot, dot, dot. Blah, blah, blah. I've examined

it numerous times over the last two decades, but I have yet to finish waiting through all

958 words. At 150 words longer than this entire segment, the sentence is just unreadable.

Believe me, I've tried to stick with it till the end, but it's impossible. I have to applaud

Proust for being able to keep everything straight in that sentence, because he sure used a lot

of semicolons, commas, clauses, and other tricks to lengthen it. I guess French literary geniuses

didn't take advantage of copy editors back then. Well, I'm going to suck it up and be the first

to trim that monstrous sentence. Here we go. Their honor precarious, their sentence too long, period.

But oh no, now my honor is precarious. My crime has been discovered. Those seven words are

an incomplete sentence known as a sentence fragment. It has no verb. Do you think Proust ever

wrote one of those? Hmm, probably not. All this Proust talk is making me hungry for a

Madeline, a small shell-shaped cake that has a starring role in In Search of Lost Time. I think

we should go in search of the perfect length for a sentence. The long and the short of it is this.

If you step in too many things, you'll get an overly long sentence. If you leave out a subject,

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