Periods are a good idea. Period.

Like most of the other students in my college American literature class, I was taken aback when we got to William Faulkner's "The Bear," from his novel Go Down, Moses, for in this story the author has sentences that go on for pages, and even paragraphs. Here is a brief example:

"He could say it, himself and his cousin juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land which was to have been his heritage, the land which old Carothers McCaslin, his grandfather, had bought with white man's money from the wild men whose grandfathers without guns hunted it, and tamed and ordered, or believed he had tamed and ordered it, for the reason that the human beings he held in bondage and in the power of life and death had removed the forest from it and ..."

Notice that Faulkner, or Faulkner's narrator, makes use of commas and apostrophes. Later in the same sentence one can find colons, semicolons and quotation marks. So the author was not averse to punctuation in general, just the use of periods. One of his sentences goes on for more than 1,600 words.

Literature professors love this, perhaps because it justifies their worth in being able to decipher what it all means. Most of the rest of us, however, and certainly my fellow students and I, would appreciate  a period once in a while. We like to come up for air. If a sentence expresses a single idea. we prefer ideas we can wrap our minds around. That's hard to do when we have forgotten the beginning of the sentence, or even the middle of the sentence, by the time we have gotten to the end.

Sentence length, like the number of syllables in the words used in those sentences, is used to determine the reading level of a piece of writing. Ben Blatt discusses this topic in Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve. His studies show that the grade level of American literature, both literary fiction and popular fiction, has been in decline in recent years. This may have something to do with the deaths of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and few other wordy writers of yore.

Back in the 1960s, most bestsellers were at about the eighth grade reading level. Today they are around the sixth grade level. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury had a grade level of 20. Not too many of us have had that many years of education. But even that novel makes simple reading compared with one of Faulkner's longer sentences with its score of 551.

In the newspaper business we strived for short paragraphs, short sentences and relatively simple words. The goal was to write stories virtually anybody could read and understand. The whole purpose of language is communication, and if your intended audience cannot understand what you are saying, it is you, not they, who has failed. This is not to say that literary fiction of the kind Faulkner wrote should not be more difficult than your typical runaway bestsellers. Still, an occasional period would be nice.

Stephen Railton

I've noticed that periods, or implied periods, are often missing in speech as well. Some people routinely speak in partial sentences. Listeners have to guess where each sentence is heading because the speaker never gets there, having moved on to the next partial sentence.

Lately I have been listening to a series of Great Courses lectures on the life and work of Mark Twain by University of Virginia professor Stephen Railton. It is good stuff, and I am enjoying the lectures very much ... except for the fact that you can't hear the periods at the end of Railton's sentences. You can hear when the next sentence begins. There is always an implied capital letter. But the previous sentence always ends with his voice implying there is more to come.

Sometimes the professor puts his period before the end of a sentence, such as, "... for the lyceum. lecture ..." One reason this is annoying is that when I have to pause the CD, I prefer to do it at the end of a sentence. With Railton, that is a challenge because you know one sentence has ended only when the next one has begun.