: Re: seeking a humorous example of long winded paragraph one sentence long Back in the day, good writing meant it was a goal to make sentences short. As I have grown older this rule has served

@Odierno164

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It's not literature, but if you get into legal writing, you'll find a lot of insanely long and grammatically convoluted sentences that you'll probably have to read at least five times to understand. This is especially the case for statutory codes.

Here's an example from the Model Penal Code, a statutory code compiled by American legal experts that has no legal force at all but that works as a kind of "suggestion" for state penal codes:

"(2) Limitations on Justifying Necessity for Use of Force.
(a) The use of force is not justifiable under this Section:
(i) to resist an arrest which the actor knows is being made by a peace officer, although the arrest is unlawful; or
(ii) to resist force used by the occupier or possessor of property or by another person on his behalf, where the actor knows that the person using the force is doing so under a claim of right to protect the property, except that this limitation shall not apply if:
(1) the actor is a public officer acting in the performance of his duties or a person lawfully assisting him therein or a person making or assisting in a lawful arrest; or
(2) the actor has been unlawfully dispossessed of the property and is making a re-entry or recaption justified by Section 3.06; or
(3) the actor believes that such force is necessary to protect himself against death or serious bodily harm."

Notice that this entire mess is one sentence and that it is extraordinarily difficult to follow because it also contains a series of exceptions to the general rule. The MPC is full of stuff like this. In fact, some of the sentences in the MPC contain a rule, an exception to the rule, and an exception to the exception. Statute-writing is pretty difficult because every single word matters, but the MPC is just badly written.

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