Why don’t writers layer and number lengthy sentences?

Question

Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin. Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read (Great Courses) (2013). pp 55-56.

Why don’t writers tier long sentences as Landon does beneath? His formatting is far more readable, and clarity's more important than the additional required space.

Answer 1

Restating the claim in the question,

• writers like Joseph Conrad should have structured their books like
  • decks of PowerPoint slides,
• which would have made them
  • more readable,
  • and clearer.

The first point to make,

• though it may seem a little cheap,
• is that
  • you haven’t tried it:
    • your questions here have all been
      • written in standardly presented prose
    • which suggests that
      • you don’t have confidence that
        • this is really all that good an idea.

The obvious problems with this idea are:

• it would have been wasteful of space,
  • thus making books more costly,
  • since only very recently were authors freed from these constraints by
    • the availability of electronic publication;
• it would have made composition much more laborious,
  • as you would have discovered if you had tried it for yourself,
  • since small changes to wording of one part of a sentence affect
    • the nesting depth of every consequent part,
  • requiring continual adjustments to indentation,
    • which again only became convenient with the development of
      • outline editing software.

But there are subtler and deeper problems:

• the tree structure only conveys its syntax,
  • but syntax is only a fraction of the content of a sentence,
    • thus giving precedence to something that
      • is of comparatively little importance in comparison to
        • semantic structure;
• it lacks the facility for ambiguity of attachment,
  • for example in Landon’s extract from Conrad,
    • the clause “motionless in the moonlight”
      • must be attached either to
        • the “entangled mass of trunks, branches,” etc.
          • (as Landon has it),
        • or “the great wall of vegetation”,
    • but either choice narrows the meaning compared to the original;
• it’s redundant,
  • duplicating information that a competent reader can reconstruct,
    • thus performing the function of a reading crutch,
      • like
        • the illustrations in a picture-book,
        • or the furigana in Japanese beginner texts;
• it could easily be incorrect,
  • landing the reader with
    • the additional tasks of
• determining whether an error has occured,
  • and if so, correcting it.

It’s naïve to think that

• presenting one’s sentences in this form will not have an effect on
  • the content of those sentences too:
    • Edward Tufte,
      • in his book The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,
      • says,
        • among many other cogent criticisms of this approach,
        • “Impoverished space leads to
          • over-generalizations,
          • imprecise statements,
          • slogans,
          • lightweight evidence,
          • abrupt and thinly-argued claims.”