Let’s borrow a sentence from some open-source text, for example, why not a sentence pulled at random from Sense and Sensibility:

It’s a nice, spindly, sentence. At first glance it might seem to be merely a fairly standard, early-19th century sort of sentence. Lots of clauses and interjections and so on, and to some sensibilities (no pun intended) it might feel a little long. But how is it working, one might ask. How does it do what it is supposed to be doing?

We might "ventilate" it thus to try and get some insight:

Let’s consider first the rhythm. To my ear, I count four beats in the first line (note here that I am not strictly speaking of metrical feet – yet; by "beat" I mean roughly a stressed syllable, like a "down beat" in music, but only roughly), two in the second, and three in the third. Were we to combine the second and third lines (which would be easy enough to do: a simple deletion, or, if you were using an application like vim, by pressing "J"), we can read the first two lines as a kind of uneven couplet, the implicit fifth "pause" beat after the semicolon serving then to strengthen the stressed ending of "decease".

Line 4 holds steady with four beats (and, I think, a significant pause after the comma, mating it up with the five-beat "couplet" across the first three lines), making the more sing-song three-beat lines 5, 6, and 7 carry the reader and their ear quickly (jauntily, even) to the end of the sentence, mirroring in rhythm the subtle narratorial shade thrown at Mrs. Dashwood and her feelings. It is not only the sense of the words that indicates this characterization, but also the rhythms of the sentence doing the characterization itself.

Looking now at the sound, we might more easily notice the consonance in line 2 between "house" and "husband", extending to "his" on line 3, which also has a fair bit of consonance between "father’s" and "decease." There is, in the next line, the "d" sound in "indelicacy" "conduct" and (depending on your accent) "greater". We might note, as well, the rhyme in the last two lines ("unpleasing" and "feeling[s]"), which further punctuate the sense of the sentence, joining forces with the rhythmic device previously mentioned.

Ventilating the sentence allows us to more easily take it apart and see exactly how it’s doing what it means to be doing. It is not unlike a New Critical "close reading," save that our interest is now not as readers (or high school students) but rather as people interested in the mechanics of the prose. This does, of course, extend very well across passages (i.e., one may not need to ventilate a sentence like "Everybody was drunk.", but were one to take a closer look at the first passage in "in our time", one might begin to notice the way the prose jaunts along more or less iambicly, while the dialog breaks the rhythm, doing what I might call the textual characterization work).

How one actually gets the words down on the page I think is too personal to really provide recommendations for, and even my own first-drafting practice is largely inconsistent and mood-based, and so I don’t know that I have much to say about "ventilation" as a tool for drafting, save the more general point that if one begins to take ideas like this seriously, one is then freed up to break lines as needed to, for example, make comments (in the following, the line that start with // is an asciidoc comment):

Though, even without their removal the "converted" text would simply read:

I, personally, find this very helpful, especially if preceded by // TK, (although searching for // is almost always just as effective) to ensure that I keep moving forward (if that’s the goal for the day), making it simple, inline, to defer certain decisions or details or points for future research until later.

This is, as I imagine you may have been expecting, where ventilated prose as a tool for improving texts really comes into its own. The process is more or less the same as in the Sense and Sensibility example above, save that instead of merely admiring Jane Austen’s prose, we can then use what information the ventilation makes more clear to improve the sentences and passages that we’ve drafted ourselves.

I will dig up some decade-plus-old prose example of my own in need of revision, and will try to show how it might be thought about — and ideally improved — along these lines. To wit:

Arguably this is fine, but there is, I think, much room for improvement given my current thinking about how I would like my sentences — and introductory sentences especially — to read (in terms of sound, rhythm, and sense).

So let’s perform a first pass, simply breaking it up to see what we might see:

Note that in a few places (i.e., lines 7 and sort of 9) I decided to pull out a noun as much as a clause or phrase, which is to say: I already have a hunch, just reading it aloud to myself, that those fragments might be part of the problem.

Looking first at the sound (for, why not switch it up), there are a few things that are almost working, for example the consonance between "Henry" and "habit," the "stared", "seconds", "switch", "stop" sequence. I’m not really happy with any of it, though, because the absence of any repetition in the vowel sounds is, I think, breaking it up too much.

To intermingle a little rhythmic looking-at, "Henry" and "habit" is actually (I think) working OK because they both fall on downbeats ("HENry was STILL in the HAbit"), and move from the back of the mouth ("eh") through the middle ("ih" in "still") and then the front ("aah"), so maybe I’m happy enough with that.

Looking at the second pair, though, we’re thrashing from a spread-front ("aeh"), to a non-spread front ("eh") to a rounded front ("iih") to a roomy back vowel ("awh"), and it’s a lot of movement of the lips; too much, I think. And this is all before we even consider that the clauses themselves are not really doing much in terms of their sense!

So bringing the sense in (and let’s narrow our attention to just the first sentence, as I’m starting to realize that this could take too long if not, and this is meant to be more illustrative than an actual fix for the opening of a story I wrote in my teens), "though he didn’t understand why" doesn’t actually make much sense, given that we learn later in the story that Henry’s wife has recently died (what I thought I had to say about this topic as a teenager is a different issue). So presumably he would understand why, even if only implicitly.

But because we’ve ventilated the prose as such, we can also see that it fails rhythmically as well. Lines 1 and 2 could be re-broken as a tetramic couplet (four beats to a line):

(And yes, I know the rhythm in the above is terrible, mostly due to the central spondee, "right side," but we’ll leave that off for now.)

These are then followed by a pentameter line:

Which un-balances the sentence (and yes, I’m well aware that the line itself is unbalanced, but), putting too much emphasis on the final clause, especially given the single-syllable "why" at the end. Sometimes you’d want a final clause to have the extra (metrical) foot, such a strong syllabic ending, but here it merely serves to underline the inappropriateness of the sense, for the prose itself overemphasizes the already questionable assertion that he would not understand why he was waking up on that side of the bed.

As such: an inconsistency, a mismatch in the sound has helped us understand more fully an error in the sense. So now I might, in revision, replace that last clause with something that better marries with the sound of the clause before, as well as something that makes — one hopes — much better sense.

This is not to say of course that a mismatch is always inappropriate, or that these need to match, that one’s clauses need always to bop along in some kind of prosodic meter (in fact: please, don’t do this), but that one can — and arguably should! — be aware of these elements in one’s prose as a means of understanding why something may or may not be working above and beyond merely "feeling" that something isn’t right.

This is also — certainly — not to say that I’m suggesting one performs these kinds of investigations on every single sentence. That way lies madness. But I do think that it can be a good way to un-knot knotty passages, understand when and why a passage or a sentence isn’t doing what it is supposed to be doing, and generally provide a practice that, over time, becomes second nature, improving one’s sentences always (or: so one hopes).

Ventilated prose — termed as such — was developed to improve the clarity and readability of prose that was either too technical or too complicated on the surface level for the target reader (naturally: Fuller’s boss). Many of the posts I link to above espouse its ability to improve one’s clarity, to help one shorten and tame long, unruly sentences that, left unchecked, may become unwieldy and out of control and eat the reader for breakfast (or at least turn them away from the allegedly impenetrable prose).

I will leave an investigation as to why — in this day and age — complicated prose, prose that requires attention and intention, is of vital importance as an exercise for the reader.

And to be fair, I like a simple sentence. I like clear prose. I think these are, at some times and in some circumstances, wonderful things to aspire to.

But also: I greatly prefer daring, fantastic, virtuosic prose that can carry you along — if only for a while, if only at first reading — without your bothering too much about what it is "saying," for the prose itself is able to carry its sense, to embody its sense, such that it is able to, itself, help communicate its meaning.

The technique described above may help you more intentionally dazzle with your prose, may help you organize your sentences and passages in such a way that their twists and turns are no longer any supposed barrier to comprehension, but rather an intrinsic part of the reader’s delight.

Thanks Kate P. for giving me a sanity check read and a number of excellent suggestions for this post’s improvement.

Thanks Lisa A. for a typo catch.