My favorite book is On the Road. When I’m feeling pretentious I tell people it’s why I write and why I love to travel.
When the famous original scroll of On the Road came to Lowell, MA I made a pilgrimage to see it. I stared at the historic document. I help up my 4 year old so he could look at.
Kerouac crafts some most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read. But some of those sentence are also the longest. And that’s why I don’t read Jack when I’m working on copy projects.
I try to keep my sentences to twenty words – max. That’s where I draw the line. It’s a classic rule of rhetoric but one often overlooked in copywriting.
Maybe copywriters just love the sound of our own words.
A lot of my work involves rewrites, paragraphs that just “need a few touch-ups.”
As you can imagine, I often see this rule shattered by those trying to write around a subject or worse by those who are trying to sound smart.
They forget or refuse to acknowledge that smart writing is often what reads like simple writing. Remember that next time you are shopping for a copywriter.
“Just so you know, the people who talk that way think that monkeys can do this.” – Don Draper
Even twenty words can be too long. I shift my sentence length back and forth, creating a rhythm. Occasionally I’ll venture into the void past twenty words, but always with a purpose (and a tinge of regret).
So, sorry Jack. Maybe someday I’ll come up with a sentence that runs 2 pages but I doubt that the audience will still be reading.
For more on Kerouac’s prose check out Tim Hunt’s work, including Kerouac’s Crooked Road.