Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

That is a complete, grammatically correct English sentence. Same word eight times. It means: bison from the city of Buffalo, who get bullied by other bison from Buffalo, are also bullying bison from Buffalo.

I'm running an experiment this week. I want you to run it with me.

Most Christian writing is flat.

One declarative sentence. Then another. Then another. Three Bible verses stacked in a row. A point, an illustration, an application. Clean. Predictable.

Forgettable.

The trick behind the buffalo sentence is the same trick that separates the line you remember from the line you scrolled past. Linguists call it center embedding. We'll just call it nesting.

It's underused in Christian writing because nobody ever taught us we were allowed to do it.

Nesting is when you take a clause and tuck it inside another clause. Two ideas occupying one sentence instead of two.

Flat: "Jesus told a story to the disciples. It was after the storm. It changed how I read every parable."

Nested: "The story Jesus told the disciples after the storm changed how I read every parable."

Same three facts. Eight fewer words. The reader's brain has to hold two ideas at once. That holding is what creates depth.

The buffalo sentence works because every "buffalo" can pull three jobs at once: a noun (the animal), an adjective (from Buffalo, NY), or a verb (to intimidate). Most words can't pull triple-duty like that. Forget about the triple-duty.

The grammatical move underneath works on any word in your draft. Any sentence can hold a clause inside another clause.

Two reasons.

First, we're trained to keep things simple for the reader. Short sentences, scannable prose, one idea at a time. Those are good defaults to keep. The mistake is treating "simple" as "flat." A nested sentence can be both simple and deep. The reader holds two truths at once instead of receiving them in a line.

Second, most of us learned to write by reading other Christian content. Devotionals. Inspirational books. Faith blogs. LinkedIn posts where the line breaks do most of the work. Most of that material is built for reassurance, not density. One thought per beat. White space everywhere. That register has its place. It's not the only register you have access to. Your reader can pause. They can reread. They can hold a longer thought in their head. Stop writing as if they can't.

The buffalo sentence has a horrifying second act. You can keep nesting.

Eleven buffalos still makes sense. So does fifteen. Twenty-three. Forty-seven words of nothing but "buffalo." At a certain depth, the sentence stays grammatically correct and becomes humanly unreadable.

Linguists call this center embedding collapse. The reader's working memory taps out around two layers of nesting. Three is risky. Four is unkind. Five is ridiculous.

One level of nesting per sentence. Two if it's a really good sentence.

🪺 Find one flat sentence in your next draft and nest it once. Look for a place where you wrote two sentences in a row about the same subject. Combine them by tucking the second one inside the first as a relative clause.

🚲 Use "that" as a training wheel. When the nesting gets confusing, drop "that" in. "The post Sara wrote" reads clearer as "the post that Sara wrote." You can take it out later. While you're learning the move, leave it in.

🗣️ Test it out loud. If you trip over your own sentence reading it aloud, you nested too deep. Cut a layer. The mouth is the most honest editor you have.

👀 Watch for the holding sensation. A successful nested sentence makes the reader hold two ideas before resolving them. If your version doesn't create that pause, you didn't nest. You just made a longer flat sentence.

The gospel is the most center-embedded story in human history. Promises tucked inside promises tucked inside a covenant tucked inside a Person. We were given the deepest material any writer has ever held.

Flat sentences underpay the material.

Try one nested sentence this week.

Create dangerously,
—Payton

P.S. The canonical buffalo sentence has eight buffalos. The longest grammatically correct one has forty-seven. Don't be a 47-buffalo writer.