Why the Second Language Writes Cleaner Prose

I have published four novels in French and none in English, and the sentences I am proudest of this year are almost all in English, a language I did not speak with any confidence until I was twenty three.

Here is a sentence I wrote in French about a woman leaving a hospital: "Elle sortit, non sans avoir jeté, comme malgré elle, un dernier regard vers la porte qu'elle venait de refermer sur ce qui, désormais, ne la concernait plus." It is grammatical, it is even elegant by the standards of a certain kind of French prose, and it took me four subordinate clauses to say that a woman looked back at a door once before leaving. Here is the same moment, drafted the same week, in English: "She looked back at the door once, then left." Six words. Nothing about the scene changed. What changed was my fluency, and the clauses I could no longer reach for automatically in a language I have to think about while using.

The L2 discount

Every additional subordinate clause in your first language costs you almost nothing, because the grammar that assembles it is automatic, learned before you could read, running underneath conscious thought. The same clause in your second or third language costs you a real decision, because you have to build it on purpose, checking agreement, checking whether the construction even exists the way you think it does. I call the effect this has on prose the L2 discount: writing in a language you are less fluent in makes ornamentation expensive, so you buy less of it, and what you keep tends to be the ornamentation you actually meant.

This is not a claim that English is a plainer language than French. It is a claim about what fluency does to a writer's spending habits. In my first language I can generate a four clause sentence without noticing I have spent anything, the way a rich man does not notice a coffee. In my third language every clause is a coffee I have to decide whether I want, and most days I decide I do not, which is how the woman ends up looking back at the door once instead of not without having thrown, as if despite herself, one final look toward the door she had just closed on what, from now on, no longer concerned her.

What this looks like as a deliberate method

Once I noticed this, I started using it on purpose rather than treating it as an accident of biography. When a French draft is running long on ornamentation I do not trust, I translate the paragraph into English first, write the plain version, and only then decide whether any of the French elaboration earns its way back in. Usually about a third of it does. The rest was fluency spending itself for no reason, the linguistic equivalent of ordering a second dessert because it was already on the table.

Why this makes readers of a certain kind uncomfortable

Writers who take pride in mastering their native language's full resources tend to hear this as an argument that limitation is secretly a virtue, that a writer should aspire to know a language just badly enough to be forced into plainness. I understand the discomfort, and I think the strong version of that objection is right. Some of the greatest long sentences in French literature are long on purpose, built by writers with total command of every clause they are spending, using length itself as an instrument the way a composer uses a sustained note. Fluency did not fail those writers. It gave them an instrument a beginner cannot pick up.

What I am arguing is narrower and less romantic than a case for limitation. The discount is a forcing function, useful specifically for writers, and I include my French self among them, who have enough fluency to spend ornamentation without noticing they are spending it. If you already know exactly why every clause in a long sentence is there and could defend each one under questioning, the discount has nothing to teach you. If you cannot, drafting the same passage in a language that will not let you cheat is the fastest way I know to find out which of your sentences were actually earning their length.