🧞 Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence — Lithub

With punctuation, a sense of the rhythm of language could be imparted, an artfulness, a lyricism, a poetry. Within a long sentence—clause upon clause, the commas and semicolons, em-dashes and colons, parentheticals and appositions piling up—there can be a veritable maze of imagery, a labyrinth of connotation, a factory of concepts; the baroque and purple sentence is simultaneously an archive of consciousness at its most caffeinated and a dream of new worlds from words alone.

At their most excessive (which is to say their least excessive), the partisans of parsimony can be Puritans, white-washing the church walls and smashing the stained-glass windows; the militants of minimalism are managers of language concerned only with the bottom line.