My Reading Note
I read a book with long, winding sentences and felt like I could take my time. Another book with short, blunt sentences kept pushing me forward. I realized then that how fast I read depends on how the book is written.
Speed in prose has little to do with how much happens in a scene. A quiet moment can feel urgent, while an action scene can feel drawn out. The difference lies in sentence length, syntax, and punctuation, which together create the reader’s sense of time passing on the page.
Short sentences tend to accelerate reading. They arrive one after another with little room for reflection. Long, complex sentences slow the reader down, requiring attention to hold multiple clauses and ideas at once. This article examines how writers use these techniques to control narrative pacing, using examples from classic literature where speed affects the reading experience as much as plot or character.
I used to think a book’s pace came from its plot. Then I read a novel where nothing much happened, but the pages kept turning anyway. When I went back to see why, I noticed the sentences were short and clean. That was when I started paying attention to speed.
What Speed Is
Speed in prose is the rate at which a reader moves through words on a page. It can be measured in sentences per minute or time spent on a single clause. Fast prose covers ground quickly, while slow prose lingers.
Sentence length has the most direct control over speed. Short sentences create momentum. Each period brings a stop, and the reader starts fresh with the next line. Long sentences slow things down by asking the reader to hold more information before the thought completes.
Syntax also matters. A sentence with multiple subordinate clauses, interruptions, and qualifiers takes more time to process than a simple subject-verb-object construction. Punctuation adds another layer. Commas create small pauses, and dashes and parentheses insert delays, while periods create full stops.
Speed in Short Sentences
Here is a passage from Jack London’s “Lost Face” (1910):
The fur-thief had outwitted them. Alone, of all their prisoners, he had escaped the torture. That had been the stake for which he played. A great roar of laughter went up. Makamuk bowed his head in shame. The fur-thief had fooled him. He had lost face before all his people. Still they continued to roar out their laughter. Makamuk turned, and with bowed head stalked away.
The first sentence lands. Then another. Then another. Each arrives separately, forcing a pause before the next begins. The effect is rapid and cumulative—the reader moves through the scene quickly, matching the sudden shift from tension to laughter to shame.
Nothing in the passage describes speed. No one is running. The action is simple: realization, laughter, humiliation. Yet the prose feels fast because the sentences are built that way. The short units create a staccato rhythm that drives the reader forward.
Reading through this story, I felt things speed up near the end. The sentences seemed shorter and more urgent. That is when I realized that speed does not need a chase scene. It just needs short sentences.
Speed in Long Sentences
Here is a passage from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913), translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff:
And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate and dissect from the front of a building the other parts of which remain plunged in darkness: broad enough at its base, the little parlour, the dining-room, the alluring shadows of the path along which would come M. Swann, the unconscious author of my sufferings, the hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase, so hard to climb, which constituted, all by itself, the tapering ‘elevation’ of an irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom, with the little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter; in a word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its performance in the provinces) to the drama of my undressing, as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o’clock at night.
The sentence winds through clause after clause, holding the reader in a single unfolding thought. There is no place to stop until the period finally arrives. The reader moves slowly, carried along by the accumulating details, unable to rush because each new phrase depends on what came before. The effect is immersion rather than speed.
I tried reading Proust fast once. It does not work. The sentences will not let you.
When Speed Shifts
A writer can change speed within a single passage. The shift itself becomes part of the effect. Here is a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006):
They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill country. Aluminum houses. At times they could see stretches of the interstate highway below them through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber. Cold and growing colder. Just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste. The track of the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk.
The passage opens with a short declarative sentence. Then come three fragments that land like quick cuts in a film. The reader moves through them rapidly. Then a longer sentence slows things as the view expands. Another fragment follows, and then the longest sentence carries the reader across the burned country. The reader slows down with it, held in the single sweeping view.
The shift in speed mirrors what the passage describes: the steady march south, the quick impressions of the terrain, and then the moment of stopping to look out over the devastation. McCarthy builds the sentences so the reader moves with the man.
What Speed Does
Speed in prose controls how quickly a reader moves through a passage. A fast passage creates urgency, breathlessness, and the sense of events pressing forward. A slow passage creates room for reflection, the sense that time has slowed down.
Short sentences accelerate reading. Each period brings a stop, and the reader starts fresh with the next line. One unit after another, the momentum builds. Long sentences slow things down. They require the reader to hold more information, track more connections, and wait longer for the thought to complete.
But speed does more than regulate the pace of reading. It also contributes to meaning. A fast passage can convey the rush of panic, the fragmented quality of memory under duress, or the staccato rhythm of thought in moments of crisis. A slow passage can suggest the gravity of grief, the duration of a sustained gaze across a landscape, or the gradual emergence of a memory held over time.
The next article in this series will examine the fourth dimension of texture: musicality, or how rhythm and sound function in prose. For the full framework, see Texture as Element of Prose Style: How Language Feels.
Writing Styles: Key Elements, Types, and Examples
I picked these two articles from the archive because they connect directly to the discussion in different ways. The guide to “Writing Styles” covers the foundational elements of prose, including sentence construction and word choice, which are the basic tools that create speed on the page. The article on “Narrative Pacing” examines how tempo functions at the larger level of scenes, chapters, and overall story rhythm, which complements the more granular focus on sentences in this piece. Together they provide context for understanding speed as both a sentence-level effect and a structural device.
Further Reading
Pace (narrative) on Wikipedia
Pacing quickly explained on Reddit
