“Write short sentences” has always been a basic guideline for plain English. I expect you’ve heard — or taught — that advice yourself. Far from questioning this, I see it as the single most important guideline for clear writing. Just shortening or splitting long sentences can change a piece of writing from gobbledegook to clarity.
Why does this matter? After all, obviously there are exceptions. Yes, I know, some sentences by great writers carry on and on for two, three or four pages. However, they are masters of the art of writing, whereas most of us bloggers are not. Besides, we are not writing for paper publication but for a screen, which is technically harder for the human eye.
How long is a short sentence?
As a rule of thumb, aim for a maximum of 21 words (three bites of seven words, or seven phrases). You can go a little longer once in a while, but be aware that on a blog, this is dangerous. Believe it or not, long sentences risk driving readers away before they read a word.
How long sentences alienate readers
Long sentences are liable to be wordy and muddled and confusing. But here I just want to mention one odd physiological reason for keeping your sentences short. The thing is, sentence length can influence readers subliminally.
Below is a sentence by William Faulkner, which I found online as an example of a long sentence. Note that this is a quote out of context: that makes it worse. If you were to meet such a sentence while reading a novel, especially on paper, you might approach it in a very different manner.
William Faulkner’s 118-word sentence
Notice how you feel when you look at this long sentence. Notice where your eyes go. Notice whether you actually do read the whole thing.
The streets are paved now, and the telephone and electric companies are cutting down more and more of the shade trees—the water oaks, the maples and locusts and elms—to make room for iron poles bearing clusters of bloated and ghostly and bloodless grapes, and we have a city laundry which makes the rounds on Monday morning, gathering the bundles of clothes into bright-colored, specially-made motor cars: the soiled wearing of a whole week now flees apparitionlike behind alert and irritable electric horns, with a long diminishing noise of rubber and asphalt like tearing silk, and even the Negro women who still take in white people’s washing after the old custom, fetch and deliver it in automobiles.
How one reader dealt with Faulkner’s long sentence
Well? What’s the verdict? As for me, this was how I “read” it.
- I read the first 11 words.
- Glanced down looking for a break.
- Noticed the two em-dashes.
- Noticed a few of the commas.
- Noticed the colon.
- Cast my eye over the whole page reading a few words and phrases: shade trees, elms, grapes, motor cars, electric horns, white people’s washing.
- Realised that the words I actually read were all adjacent to white space: an em-dash, comma or colon.
- Decided not to read the whole thing.
Am I lazy? Am I semi-literate? Am I stupid? No, no and no. Nor are you. We are human.
Your readers’ eyes crave white space
You want people to read your blog, not just to glance and run away. A mass of text is frightening. People scan it to find out if it’s going to be worth the effort of reading. But they can’t spot any keywords because there are just too many.
So give them white space. Give them full stops (and headlines and paragraph breaks, but that’s another story). Full stops are easy. Full stops are your friends.
A more academic or intellectual reader may be used to tackling long, solid, impenetrable chunks of text. But they’d secretly rather not, and anyway, when reading on a screen those academic eyes are straining. So give them a break. Write short sentences.
Don’t bully yourself over long sentences: just fix them
If this information about plain English is new to you, don’t worry and don’t despair. Just glance at your own blog post and check that it has enough full stops to break up the text.
No need to count every word. If readers can tell how long your sentences are without reading them, so can you. If 21 words occupy about a line and a half on your own screen, regard that as your limit. Get it?