Compromise and Conceit

A short story of mine was just rejected by a SF/Fantasy magazine. Along with the usual form rejection I was lucky enough to receive some feedback, and one of their points was that my sentences are too long. Yes, they directly said that!

I have always assumed that sentence length was a matter of style. Each person writes with their own cadence, which we change when we want things to be “lyrical” (e.g. supposedly certain types of fantasy) or to describe action (when our sentences should get shorter). But since this feedback came from an authority who reads lots of stories, it triggered me to investigate the relationship between sentence length, style, and the institutional diktats of modern publishing.

Who is writing long sentences and short sentences? Is this stylistic feedback an idiosyncrasy of a single magazine or is it an industry-wide rule? What do classic authors do? I decided to investigate.

The modern style of brevity
I have been seeing author advice on social media (e.g. Reels, Threads) that recommends shorter sentences, removing “filler” words, using only direct, active language, and avoiding adverbs. Most of this advice at its most superficial level is just a helpful tool to avoid clutter, but in some cases sentence length seemed to be an end in itself. At the same time, most of those online writing-advisors seem like grifters, and a lot of instagram writing advice seems, ironically, to be AI-generated, so I haven’t ever put much stock in it. But then, getting rid of every unnecessary word was Orwell’s shtick, wasn’t it? Along with removing what he called flyblown cliches, and words that obscured meaning. Isn’t he a great writer, who we should listen to? But Orwell’s writing, while informative and politically powerful, is not generally considered especially stylistically powerful. So who else is pushing this idea in the modern literary world?

A few google searches revealed that there is an entire movement in writing, primarily American, deriving from the “Iowa Writers workshop”, that insists on what one critic calls low attack surface writing, and which has also been credited with a simplistic, mechanistic writing style that is now widely represented in the kind of short stories published in magazines like The New Yorker. Some characteristics of this style seem to be an insistence on short sentences, absence of stylistic flourishes, and a focus on the simple facts of the telling. When this style appears in Instagram Reels giving advice for writers it seems to insist on a ruthless commitment to “showing”, not “telling”, to the point of recommending writing that is factually clear but emotionally vague, prioritizing descriptions with opaque meaning over simple explanations of what people are thinking or feeling.

But are writers actually using short sentences? Is it a hallmark of better fiction? Would classic writers get published in the magazine that rejected my short story?

Who uses long sentences?
I investigated by digging up excerpts from famous or classic novels of different genres, by examining short story excerpts from some modern SF and Fantasy magazines, and by pulling a few arbitrary short stories from magazines I subscribe to. To analyze sentence length I counted the number of words in each excerpt, and used ctrl-F to count the number of full stops, exclamation marks and question marks. The word count divided by the punctuation count gives an approximate average sentence length. For books I used chapter 1 (except Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for which I arbitrarily used chapter 2). Here are the results, in words per sentence for each case.

• My published story, [book:Collapse Vignettes: Road Trip|245121318]: 16.3
• Lord Foul’s Bane: 14.7
• The Riddle-Master of Hed: 10.3
• The Swords of Lankhmar: 13.9
• The Shadow of the Torturer: 14.9
• The Black Company: 7.6
• The Blue Sword: 21.8
• The King Beyond the Gate: 12.8
• Close your eyes, (Aesthetica Creative writing prize 2025): 15.8
• Vanya and the Dog Witch (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2025): 12.8
• The End of the Line (Analog SF, 2025): 15.2
• Last Train to Gertrude Stein (Asimov’s SF&Fantasy, 2026): 16.2
• Unnatural Selection (Aurealis, 2026): 7.8
• A Wizard of Earthsea: 25.2
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: 14.8
• Pride and Prejudice: 11.7
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles: 23.3

The story I had rejected was 19.0 words per sentence.

Word counts in my selection vary widely, from 7.6 at the low end (Glen Cook!) to 25.2 at the high end (Ursula K. LeGuin!) My published story and my rejected story are well within the wide range of word counts in classic novels, but a little longer than the word counts of almost all modern magazines. It does appear that Ursula K. LeGuin, one of the greatest writers of the modern era, would struggle to get published in current magazines, and her prose style is well beyond the typical sentence length of modern literature, as was Thomas Hardy’s.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Ursula LeGuin was doing anything wrong when she wrote A Wizard of Earthsea!

There are a few other things to note about this list. First and most surprising was that Austen, who is generally seen as wordy, is not; but this could be because the chapter I selected was dialog-heavy, and dialog tends to be shorter than description. For example, the excerpt I took from The Riddlemaster of Hed has an average of 10.3 words per sentence, but the opening three sentences of description are all greater than 20 words long. The opening sentence of the book is 24 words long! Also I read a few people online (reddit and the like) saying that word counts are typically longer for fantasy novels because they’re more “lyrical” but I don’t get the sense that this is the case: Last Train to Gertrude Stein is much more wordy than The King Beyond the Gate.

Do short sentences matter?
I think it’s very difficult to write anything meaningful in 7 or 8 words, except some basic dialog. There is barely space in eight words for a sentence to carry meaningful information and be descriptive. I think that if we ruthlessly pare back our writing to meet a short-sentence standard we will necessarily limit our style, limit the information we convey, and induce a kind of conformity in literary manners. I don’t think we should do this.

Some further research found a lot of critique of the MFA house style, and of the influence of the Iowa Writing Workshop style on literature. I found an interesting article from Electric Literature about the way that these workshops were run, that also linked them to fake authenticity and again raised the idea of defensiveness in writing. Another article suggested that the publishing industry has been dying not because of a lack of interest in writing among the public, but because it has slowly become a self-involved clique that values only this MFA house style, which appeals to no one except critics. If that is the case then we aspiring authors run into a problem, since we need to write in this style for agents to notice us, and then no one will read our work because it’s not actually a good way to write; in turn critics will demand more capitulation to this style, which will further alienate potential readers, which is why some people are campaigning against this style and its influence on literary fiction.

I don’t think this debate is new, and it takes place against a backdrop of broader concerns about the death of the novel, the decline of literacy, and the influence of smartphones and tv on reading that I think are highly overrated. But to the extent that it affects me as an author, I can happily report based on a brief review of published work that short sentences appear to be a purely fashionable demand, a recent fad that I hope will pass. Some great writers have been quite pithy; others have been very voluble. There appears to be no link between sentence length and quality, and to the extent that there is a movement towards this kind of dry, prose-light style of functional writing, it does not relate in any way to the quality of writing. There is no link. Of course we should do our best to make our writing clear, precise and efficient. But we should not think that this is particularly related to the length of our sentences – it is the content, not the length, that made Le Guin or Hardy great writers. I won’t be submitting to that particular magazine any more, and I’ll be wary of anyone who puts great stock in sentence brevity as a marker of style. I also think that this insistence on short sentences may be related to the recent imposition on novel structure that they follow an established narrative framework (e.g. 3 act structure), that every scene should have “stakes” and that any scene that does not serve to move the story forward should be removed. I don’t think that’s how classical writers worked, and I think much of this advice arises from fear that modern readers can’t handle lots of words. Rather than being a response to the death of the novel, I think these rules might be helping to kill it, because nobody wants to read terse, vacant prose in repeated short sentences with unimaginative dialog tags, that strictly avoids telling you anything about the world or the story except the basic information you strictly need to know to get to the end of the story. It’s like food as fuel rather than eating as a physical pleasure. I don’t want to read books like this!

I enjoy reading, and if an author writes well I don’t want them to skimp on their work so I can get to the end of their story as quickly as possible. Give me more! I hope this fad will past, and if this “MFA house style” has a stranglehold on literary fiction, I hope that will pass too.