The best way to make your sentences tighter and easier to understand is to simplify them. That is, write mostly simple sentences.

Allow me to channel your fifth-grade English teacher for a moment to remind you that a simple sentence uses a subject-verb-object sentence structure:

Subject > Verb > Object

We won the game.

It contains one independent clause and no dependent clauses.

Types of sentence structures

As you move up the ladder of complexity, you reach compound and complex sentences — sentences with dependent and independent clauses glued together with conjunctions and punctuation.

This is where your fifth-grade teacher yammered:

Blah blah blah compound verbs blah blah blah blah compound subjects blah blah basic sentences blah blah blah subordinate clauses blah blah only have one subject blah blah blah blah expresses a complete thought blah blah types of simple sentences blah blah blah

Let’s skip all that, shall we? Instead, let’s turn to Al Borowski, president of Priority Communication Skills Inc., who delivers my favorite reminder of the types of sentences structures:

This is a simple sentence.

This is a compound sentence; it contains two independent clauses.

This is a complex sentence that contains one dependent clause and one independent clause.

This is a compound-complex sentence, and because it contains two independent clauses and a dependent clause, it becomes a long sentence.

Here are four ways to simplify your sentences:

1. Get to the verb faster.

Quick! Where’s your verb?

It should be near the front of your sentence, right after your subject. But here, the verb doesn’t show up until 28 words in:

Don’t bury your verb under a long parenthetical phrase (let alone your whole boilerplate). Remember: You can always explain what your company is the leading provider of in a separate sentence.

2. Write ‘low-depth’ sentences.

That’s an example of a high-depth sentence. Depth refers to the number of words before the verb in a sentence. High-depth sentences are harder to understand than low-depth sentences, found readability expert G. R. Klare in a 1976 review of 36 readability studies. The deeper the sentence — the more words before the verb — the lower the comprehension.

Twenty-two words, for instance, delay the verb in this sentence:

3. Force the verb to the front.

Here’s a quick trick for forcing the verb toward the front of the sentence from Joseph M. Williams, author of Style: Toward Clarity and Grace:

“Run a line under the first five or six words of every sentence. If you find that (1) you have to go more than six or seven words into a sentence to get past the subject to the verb and (2) the subject of the sentence is not one of your characters, take a hard look at that.”

Great advice.

4. Lean to the left.

Here’s a trick for making even the longest sentence easier to read and understand: Write “right-branching” sentences. A right-branching sentence starts with the subject and verb, branching off into subordinate elements on the right.

“If meaning is created by subject and verb, then a sentence that begins with subject and verb MAKES MEANING EARLY,” writes Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at The Poynter Institute’s and author of Writing Tools.

And that makes it easier to understand.

Once you’ve established meaning at the beginning — the “left side” — of the sentence, you can branch out on the right side with “almost limitless clauses” and still remain understandable, Clark counsels.

Here’s how it works, using a sentence from J.D. Salinger’s 1945 Esquire short story, “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise”:

That’s a 30-word sentence. Under normal circumstances, it would achieve less than 50 percent comprehension, according to American Press Institute research. Yet it’s perfectly understandable. That’s because it makes meaning on the left and branches out on the right.

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This just in, writes one of my favorite correspondents, sharing a sentence his subject matter expert has written:

Somebody just kill me now, my friend writes.

Or, as his subject matter expert might put it, “Somebody just problem solve his way to a homicide success immediately.”

What’s wrong with this sentence? It:

• Weighs in at 30 words long
• Features 6.1-character words, on average
• Boasts 25% hard words

Worse, it’s been through the de-verb-o-rizer a few times. That’s a problem, because verbs make copy easier to read.

Verbs boost reading ease.

In 1928, Mabel Vogel and Carleton Washburne became the first researchers to statistically correlate writing traits with readability. They found that the more verbs in a writing sample, the easier the sample was to read. In fact, the number of verbs in a 1,000-word sample ranked No. 6 among 19 key elements that contributed to readability.

Why? Because verbs:

• Make words shorter and more recognizable. Short, familiar words rank among the top two predictors of readability, according to 70 years of research.
• Simplify sentences. Subject-verb-object is the easiest sentence structure to read and understand. And sentence length and structure is the other element most likely to predict readability.
• Reveal action. Action is easier for readers to process than things, so verbs are easier to process than nouns.

How can you mind your verbs to boost reading ease?

Reverbify nouns.

Call it verbicide: “Nominalizations” are verbs that writers have turned into nouns — “problem solved,” for instance, instead of “solved the problem.”

In 1979, attorney Robert Charrow and linguist Veda Charrow ran a test to see whether nominalizations and other “linguistic constructions” affected comprehension. They asked 35 people called for jury duty in Maryland to listen to a series of standard jury instructions, then tested participants’ understanding of what they’d heard. Then the researchers reverbified the nouns and otherwise simplified the copy and tested the instructions on a different group.

The reverbified copy was 14 percentage points easier to understand.

At least three other studies have also linked verbicide with reduced comprehension:

• E.B. Coleman and P.J. Blumenfield (1963)
• G.R. Klare (1976)
• D.B. Felkner et al (1981)

No doubt about it: When you write in verbs, you make words shorter, sentences simpler and copy brisker. This sentence, for instance, weighs in at an average of 7.0 characters per word:

This report explains our investment growth stimulation projects.

But reverbify some of those nouns, and you can bring that average down to 5.9 characters per word:

“This report explains our projects to stimulate growth in investments.”

Notice how many verbs suffocate in the nouns of my friend’s passage:

“Louisiana Station employees have problem solved their way to an XYZ Company Continuous Improvement success by purchasing a specifically designed storage cabinet to protect the life ring at the neutralization discharge pond.”

Those dying verbs make the passage thick, stuffy and hard to understand.

Zoom, zoom

Once you’ve reverbified your copy, push your verbs. Make them as strong and specific as possible.

“A story is a verb, not a noun,” wrote one of the former editors of The New York Times.That means the verb is the story. The stronger the verb, the stronger the story.

How well do your verbs tell your story?
___

Sources: William H. DuBay, “Smart Language,” Impact Information, 2007

Roy Peter Clark, “Thirty Tools for Writers,” The Poynter Institute, June 19, 2002

David Bowman, owner and chief editor of Precise Edit, “Keep Verbs as Verbs,” 300 Days of Better Writing, Sept. 24, 2010

“Break up complex sentences to help readers,” The Manager’s Intelligence Report

A Plain English Handbook (PDF), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 1998

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Read the words coffee, camphor or eucalyptus, and the part of your brain most closely related to the sense of smell responds. Read the words bingo, button or bayonette, and they don’t.

The words you choose not only have the power to change your readers’ minds. They can also change their brains, according to new neurological research.

“Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters,” reports Annie Murphy Paul in “Your Brain on Fiction” for The New York Times. “Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.”

Paul reports on new studies that show how words make us smell scents, feel textures, experience action — even understand others better.

1. The nose knows.

In 2006, researchers in Spain used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to scan participants’ brains. Then they asked participants to read words describing odors — rancid, resin and oregano, for instance — as well as scent-neutral words, like circle, short and sketch.

When participants read the words describing odors, their primary olfactory cortex — the part of the brain most closely associated with the sense of smell — lit up. When they read the neutral words, this region remained dark.

Bottom line: Readers have a physical response to sensual description. Want to make your readers’ brains light up? Use descriptive language.

Smell what I say

2. Feel the burn.

Three researchers at Emory University used fMRI scans on subjects who read phrases involving texture.

When the subjects read textural metaphors — Life is a bumpy road, for instance, or He is a smooth talker — the sensory cortex, which is responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. When they read neutral phrases with the same meaning — Life is a challenging road or He is persuasive — the sensory cortex remained dark.

3. And … action!

Cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France studied how people’s brains reacted to phrases conveying motion.

When subjects read action verbs like write and throw, their motor cortexes — the part of the brain that coordinates the body’s movements — lit up. When they read nouns like mill and cliff, their motor cortexes stayed dark.

Even more interesting, one part of the motor cortex lit up when subjects read about arm movement, while a different part did when they read about leg action.

4. In character

Just as the brain treats descriptions of physical sensations and action as if they were real, it also treats written interactions among people as if they were real social encounters.

Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, analyzed 86 fMRI studies published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology. His conclusion: As we practice understanding people when we read, we become better at understanding them in reality.

Narratives, Paul writes, help us “identify with subjects’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers.”

Virtual reality

Bottom line?

“The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life,” Paul writes. “In each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.”

Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto and a published novelist, agrees.

Reading, he told Paul, is a reality simulator that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.”

For writers, that means that the words you choose aren’t just words. They can also be things, experiences — even emotions. Choose them well.

___

Sources: Annie Murphy Paul, “Your Brain on Fiction,” The New York Times, March 17, 2012

Julio González, Alfonso Barros-Loscertales, Friedemann Pulvermuller, Vanessa Meseguer,  Ana Sanjuán, Vicente Belloch,  and Cesar Avila, “Reading ‘cinnamon’ activates olfactory brain regions,” NeuroImage, May 2006

Simon Lacey, Randall Stilla and K. Sathian, “Metaphorically feeling: Comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex,” Brain & Language, Vol. 120, Issue 3, March 2012, pp. 416–421

Véronique Boulenger, Beata Y. Silber, Alice C. Roy, Yves Paulignan, Marc Jeannerod and Tatjana A. Nazir, “Subliminal display of action words interferes with motor planning: A combined EEG and kinematic study,” Journal of Physiology-Paris, Vol. 102, Issues 1–3, January-May 2008, pp. 130-136

Raymond A. Mar, “The Neural Bases of Social Cognition and Story Comprehension,” Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 3, 2011, pp. 103-134

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