This evening Sydney asked me to proofread his paper before he submitted it to his examining committee (yup, his major exams are coming up on the 18th). Such requests usually spark long evenings of vigorous discussion as we try to reconcile my desire for a bit of panache with his need to keep things clear and philosophical. I’m not talking about sonnet rhyme schemes or anything; I just want him to consider using a synonym or two to relieve the tedium of reading the same technical term over and over and over again. And Sydney, in turn, will never let me live down the fact that the average sentence length of my papers is somewhere around thirty words.
But this time I caught him.
In the first paragraph of his paper I asked him to stick to a single term, since he seemed to alternate between “ultimate” and “final” in his discussion. And then I stumbled across a sentence that was 75 words long! Not obscuring its length in appositive or subordinate clauses or making use of the semicolon, it was just really and truly long, and brash as can be about it. Something tells me I’m going to hold onto this one for years to come.
Erin
Alan Schmierer