How to Write a Left-Branching Sentence, With Dazzling Examples from Martin Luther King and Maureen Dowd

To write clearly, almost always use right-branching sentences. Use left-branching sentences only when you command total control of language.

To understand this concept, think of the image of a tree. The trunk represents the main aftion of the sentence. The branches represent descriptions needed to provide essential details for the reader to understand the point.

Here’s a classic right-branching sentence:

Willie Mays was the best player of his generation: a consistent hitter, a menacing power threat, and a daring baserunner, with a sure glove and a cannon for an arm.

In this passage, we know the subject and verb before we get the details. We could not get lost because the author states the point clearly in the first six words. What follows is an elaboration of those six words.

Let’s see how we might express the same idea as a left-branching sentence:

As a consistent hitter, a menacing power threat, and a daring baserunner, with a sure glove and a cannon for an arm, Willie Mays was the best player of his generation.

Here, we get the details before we discover the subject and verb. We have to wade through details before we get to the main point. In a short sentence like this, we can get away with an occasional left-branching sentence. But we risk losing the reader if we write a long sentence, with dozens and dozens of words, before we get to the subject and verb.

Still, done well, the left-branching sentence can be  work of art. It creates drama and intrigue by listing all kinds of details before getting to the subject and verb. Done well, the left-branching creates suspense. The reader eager anticipates the point at the end.

The best example of a left-branching sentence comes from Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” King was in jail for his part in the Birmingham Campaign of 1963, one of the most consequential moments of the civil rights movement. He smuggled this classic essay out of jail on scraps of paper. His assistant Wyatt Tee Walker typed it up. In this passage, King answers the question of his liberal friends and conservative critics, who forever counseled patience in the battle for basic fairness and dignity:

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

In this 316-word masterpiece, King opens with ten vivid images of the indignities of racism and segregation. Each one is like a scene in a movie. Each one invites empathy. each one leads, inexorably, to King’s explanation of “why we find it difficult to wait.”

In the May 24 New York Times, Maureen Dowd uses a left-branching sentence to gasp at Donald Trump’s endless capacity to distract the American public from crises spiraling out of control:

On Thursday, as China played King Kong with Hong Kong; as unemployment rose to 38.6 million; as broken dams unleashed a flood in Central Michigan; as the president continued to stubbornly and recklessly claim he was taking hydroxychloroquine, causing sales to soar; as the news sunk in that if the U.S. had acted even a week sooner on social distancing that 36,000 people might still be alive; as Senate Republicans finally cemented themselves to Trump and his crazy schemes; as Trump stuck to his threat of withholding federal funds to Michigan and Nevada if those states enabled voters to vote; as a partisan know-nothing was put in charge of all our intelligence; as Trump pulled out of another major arms control pact; as Mike Pompeo basked in getting Trump to fire another inspector general (this one looking into a backdoor deal to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and brazen grifting by the Pompeos), the cliffhanger president made sure the focus was on just one little thing: Would he or wouldn’t he wear a mask as he toured the Ford plant in Ypsilanti?

In this 182-word wonder, Maureen Dowd offers a series of vivid images of world crises as Donald Trump revels in his reality-show theatrics. The power of this sentence comes from the litany of horrors followed by an empty man’s obsession with attention.

To make these sentences work, King and Dowd use signaling devices. For King it’s the word “when”; for Dowd it’s the word “as.” The repetition of these words, at the beginning of each example, signals yet another horror. These words tell the reader: Hang in there, you need to hear what follows before we get to the ultimate point. With the end of this repetition, the reader will be ready for the kicker–the point of the whole sentence.

For inexpert writers, a long left-branching sentence is a danger zone. You should mark it off with yellow police tape and then break it down into manageable pieces. But in the hands of a master, an occasional left-branching sentence creates a series of vivid scenes, suspense, a swelling of emotions, and then–boom!–a powerful point.

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Appendix

From King’s ‘Letter From a Birmingham Jail’

From Dowd’s ‘Covid Dreams, Trump Nightmares’