Here’s the problem with long sentences: Every time you add a word, you reduce comprehension. Add another one, reduce it even further. Add another one, reduce it even further.

There’s almost a one-to-one correlation between sentence length and understanding, according to a study by the American Press Institute.^[1] The research, based on studies of 410 newspapers, found that with average sentences of:

• 8 words or less, readers understood 100% of the story.
• 14 words, readers understood 90% of the information.
• 43 words, readers understood less than 10%.

And that 107-word sentence your subject-matter expert made you write? After reading that sentence, your readers not only don’t know what they’ve read, they also forget where they parked the car. That’s a net loss of knowledge — not exactly our goal as communicators.

It’s not just the American Press Institute. Nearly 140 years of research shows that short sentences are easier to read and understand.^[2] In fact, sentence length has been proven in the lab — again and again — to be one of the top two predictors of reading ease. (Word length and familiarity is the No. 1 predictor.)

That’s because in long sentences, the subject, verb and object are too far away from each other. They have to rewrite the sentence in their heads so they can understand.

How many times are they going to do that? If it’s my sister’s oncologist, sure, I’ll do it all day long until I understand what’s going on. But if it’s a brand message — a news release or an email newsletter or blog post — I’m not going to work that hard, and neither are your readers.

Breathe or burn.

Because long sentences reduce understanding, one of my college professors used to make us read our long sentences aloud in front of the entire class. If we ran out of breath before we ran out of sentence, we got an embarrassing reminder of the importance of short sentences.

One professor out there is crueler than mine. He’d make his students light a match and read their sentences out loud. If they ran out of match before they ran out of sentence, they got a painful reminder of the importance of short sentences.

Why short sentences?

Short sentences:

Increase readability

• Sentence length and complexity make up half of the 19 writing attributes that make messages harder to read, found researchers Mabel Vogel and Carleton Washburne in 1928.^[3] Those attributes included words per sentence, complex sentences and conjunctions, which link phrases together into longer sentences.
• Sentence length and the percentage of prepositions compose half of the four elements that achieve a virtually perfect reading grade level correlation, found Edmund B. Coleman in 1965. Prepositions combine clauses into longer sentences.^[4]
• Shortening and simplifying sentences made revised copy six grade levels easier to read, found researchers Thomas Duffy and Paula Kabance in 1981.^[5]

Increase understanding

• Long sentences decrease comprehension, found readability researcher Ralph Ojemann in 1934. He found that sentences including prepositions and dependent clauses reduced understanding.
• The more indeterminate clauses a passage includes, the harder it is to understand, found Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale in 1934. Why? Indeterminate clauses make sentences longer and increase the number of ideas per sentence.^[6]
• Five sentence characteristics — including length, passive voice and embedded clauses — affected comprehension, found readability expert G. R. Klare in 1976.^[7]

So … how long is too long?

____

Appendix

^[1] American Press Institute via Jon Ziomek, associate professor emeritus, Medill School of Journalism

^[2] William H. DuBay, Unlocking Language (PDF), Impact Information (Costa Mesa, Calif.), 2006

^[3] William H. DuBay, Unlocking Language: The Classic Readability Studies (PDF), Impact Information, 2006, p. 55

^[4] William H. DuBay, Smart Language: Readers, Readability, and the Grading of Text (PDF), Impact Information, Jan. 25, 2007, p. 80

^[5] William H. Dubay, The Principles of Readability (PDF), Impact Information, Aug. 25, 2004, pp. 39-40

^[6] William H. Dubay, The Principles of Readability (PDF), p. 16

^[7] William H. Dubay, The Principles of Readability (PDF), p. 39

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If your sentences are too long, readers won’t understand them.

So how can you write shorter sentences? Here are six ways to streamline sentences:

1. Find long sentences.

Paste your message into the Hemingway Editor. It will show you which sentences are hard (yellow highlighting) or very hard (red highlighting) to read.

Then replace complicated sentences with simple sentences, longer sentences with shorter sentences. Separate dependent clauses; change passive into active voice.

Keep working until you’ve cleared all of the colored highlights out of your text.

2. Use more periods.

The story goes that when future columnist James J. Kilpatrick was a young newspaper reporter, he wrote lots of deadly long sentences. Finally, in frustration, the city editor gave Kilpatrick a piece of paper covered with dots.

“These interesting objects, which apparently you have never encountered before, are known as periods,” the editor said. “You would do well to use them.”

We’d all do well to use more periods. Just hear what these experts have to say:

“There’s not much to be said about the period, except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.”

— William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well

“No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Prize-winning author

So scan your copy for punctuation marks other than periods. Those include colons, commas, dashes, ellipses, parentheses, semicolons. These punctuation marks connect dependent and independent clauses together to create sprawling sentences.

These writing pros aren’t fans:

“I like to use as few commas as possible so that sentences will go down in one swallow without touching the sides.”

— Florence King, author of Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye

“Anyone who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable and question whether it is necessary.”

— H.W. Fowler, English lexicographer

“The semicolon is “the only unretweetable punctuation mark.”

— Dan Zarrella, viral marketing scientist, based on his study of 1 million retweets

“My thought for the day is that the semicolon rarely helps a passage; usually it creates little more than clutter. This is my second thought for the day: The semicolon rarely helps a passage. Usually it creates little more than clutter.”

— James J. Kilpatrick, journalist and author of The Writer’s Art

“No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly.”

— Poet Richard Hugo

When you find commas, dashes, semicolons and other punctuation marks, see whether you can substitute a period instead. As Kilpatrick writes:

“The period, believe me, is the best friend a writer will ever have.”

You would do well to use them.

3. List lists.

If you have a series of three or more items, break them out of the sentence into a bulleted or numbered list. Readers perceive bullets as each being separate sentences and paragraphs.

This is especially important online, where readers skim even more than they do in print. In one test, usability expert Jakob Nielsen made a webpage 47% more usable by breaking copy up and lifting ideas off the page. ¹

4. Search and destroy conjunctions.

Another way to shorten sentences is to reduce the number of conjunctions.

Conjunctions glue phrases together into long sentences. So if your sentences are too long, use Microsoft Word’s Find function to search for conjunctions. They include and, or, also, but, so, then and plus.

When one of my writing coachees who wrote deadly long sentences tried this trick, she found 23 ands in a 500-word article. Those are pretty good clues for places to shorten.

When you find conjunctions, see whether you can replace them with a period. Or, instead of replacing them, start your sentence with a conjunction.

5. Pass on prepositions.

Reducing the number of prepositions is another way to shorten your paragraphs.

Because prepositions link words and phrases together, they make sentences longer and harder to understand. Since 1928, researchers have shown that prepositions reduce comprehension (Vogel and Washburne, 1928; Ojemann, 1934; Lorge, 1944; Coleman, 1965; Klare, 1976). ²

Take this sentence, from a Starbuck’s release …

“By far, this is the most angst-ridden decision we have made in my more than 25 years with Starbucks, but we realize that part of transforming a company is our ability to look forward, while pursuing innovation and reflecting, in many cases, with 20/20 hindsight, on the decisions that we made in the past, both good and bad.”

That sentence weighs in at 58 words, glued together with 10 prepositions. As the Rev Up Readership member who called this to my attention said:

“Apparently, someone in their PR department had too many cafe mochas and went a little crazy with the prepositional phrases.”

6. Don’t fix fragments.

Mrs. Webb, your 3rd-grade teacher, probably counseled you to avoid sentence fragments. Mrs. Webb was wrong. Sentence fragments can help you:

• Create drama.
• Make a transition.
• Emphasize an important idea.
• Change the pace of your piece.
• Make your copy sound conversational.
• And, of course, make sentences shorter.

Used strategically, fragments can make your copy tighter and more interesting.

Period.

____

Sources:

^[1]Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes, “Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web,” Nielsen Norman Group, Jan. 1, 1997

^[2]William H. DuBay, Smart Language: Readers, Readability, and the Grading of Text, Impact Information, Costa Mesa, California

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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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Add a word to your sentence, and you’ll reduce comprehension. Add another once, reduce it even further. Add another one and reduce it even more.

There’s almost a one-to-one correlation between sentence length and understanding, according to research by the American Press Institute. The research, based on studies of 410 newspapers, correlated the average number of words in a sentence with reader comprehension.

The study found that:

• With average sentences of 8 words or less, readers understood 100% of the story. (Downside: Copy might sound as if it had been ripped from a Dick and Jane book.)
• At 14 words, they understood 90% of the information.
• At 43 words, they understood less than 10%.

And that 107-word sentence your subject-matter expert made you write? It actually subtracts from the sum of human knowledge. After reading that sentence, your readers not only don’t know what they’ve read, they also forget where they parked the car.

That’s a net loss of knowledge — not exactly our goal as communicators.

So how short should sentences be?

Write short sentences like the Times.

Take a tip from the pros at The New York Times, and keep sentences short.

Times sentences average 15 words, according to our analysis of all of the stories in a recent edition of the newspaper. (We skipped the sports pages to avoid skewing the results.)

So aim for an average sentence length of about 15 words, like these from the Times:

Some companies that do approve business-class travel do so only in one direction, however.

Its broadband package is also the home to the sports broadcaster ESPN in Britain.

They added that the plaintiffs’ side lacked actual people to say they were harmed.

Build drama, create rhythm and make points powerfully by sprinkling in some super-short sentences like these, from the Times, which range from 5 to 1 word:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

He was 84.

No.

“Times readers are sophisticated and don’t expect ‘Run, Spot, run’ syntax,” writes Philip B. Corbett, who’s in charge of revising the newsroom’s style manual. “But news is read in a hurry, and we should strive for clear, sharp prose that aids rapid comprehension. Long, complex sentences slow readers down and can lead our syntax astray.”

Amen.

How short should a sentence be?

Ask the experts:

A “53-word sentence feels like my junk drawer — too much information crammed into too small a space.”

— Daphne Gray-Grant, publication coach

 “For readable writing that doesn’t tax your readers, vary your sentence length, seek an average in the low 20s, and cut any sentence of 45 words or more.”

— Wayne Schiess, senior lecturer at The David J. Beck Center for Legal Research, Writing, and Appellate Advocacy

 “The 25-word rule isn’t bad as long as you don’t follow it. Don’t count words and stick religiously to the 25-word limit. A long row of sentences all 25 words long can be as dull as a collection of short sentences can be, unless you’re writing for 8-year-olds.”

— Authors of Writing Tips for Word Lovers

 “The ability to write clear, crisp sentences that never go beyond 20 words is a considerable achievement.”

— Joseph M. Williams, the author of Style: Toward Clarity and Grace

 “Writers who demand attention seldom average more than 17 words a sentence.”

— Jack Hart, author of A Writer’s Coach

 “Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum: one.

“No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly.

“Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.”

— Poet Richard Hugo

“There are no absolute rules of good writing — generalizations are instantly riddled with exceptions — but the principle of the 16-word average sentence comes closest. No other single step you can take will show such quick results in clarity and vigor.”

— Jack Cappon, longtime Associated Press editor

 “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous.

“Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.

“Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony.”

— Gary Provost, author of 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing

 “Imagine a clock that starts ticking after the 10th word. With each additional word, the ticking gets louder.

“After the 20th word, the ticking is VERY loud. After the 40th, it’s stadium-crowd loud. After 45, deafening.”

— Tom Silvestri, president of Media General Community Newspapers

What’s your average sentence length? What sentence length do you aim for?

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Short sentences are best. But make every sentence simple and short, and your copy will read like “See Dick run” primers.

So vary the length of your sentences — for interest, for drama, for rhythm.

Fluctuating sentence lengths can help you:

1. Make a point more powerfully.

“People read long sentences quickly,” says Jacqui Banaszynski, associate managing editor at The Seattle Times. “They read short sentences more slowly. Short sentences are power points in your copy.”

Take these powerful passages from a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the New York Daily News about the plight of Sept. 11 rescue workers. Notice how the lead’s staccato sentences hit you in the chest like machine gun fire:

A man’s life is at stake. His name is Vito Valenti. On Sept. 11 he was caught in the maelstrom and stayed at Ground Zero as a volunteer to help in the frantic rescue and recovery operation. And today he is dying.

The rest of the article moves along at a more leisurely cadence with an average sentence length of 16.5 words. But the ending returns to gunfire pace:

What power points are you making in your piece? How can you use short sentences to slow readers down and better make your point?

“Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences that were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, novelist

2. Clarify complex concepts.

Shorter sentences increase understanding. So the harder your topic is to understand, the shorter your sentences should be.

“The oldest and best advice in the business is: The tougher it is to tell, the slower and simpler you tell it.”

— Bob Levey, “hometown columnist” for the Washington Post

3. Increase credibility.

In times of crisis, make your sentences, words and paragraphs shorter and simpler. That will show your organization to be transparent, rather than covering up the facts by obfuscating.

“If a writer wants the reader to think something is the absolute truth, the writer should render it in the shortest possible sentence. Trust me.”

— Roy Peter Clark, author of Writing Tools, paraphrasing Tom Wolfe

4. Create drama.

A series of short sentences slows the reader down, building suspense, Clark writes. They serve as cliff-hangers, propelling the reader through the copy.

Long sentences, on the other hand, can create a breathless, slow-motion, stream-of-consciousness scene. Take this beauty, from novelist Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tinkers:

Notice how the two short sentences and medium-length sentence launch that 130-word one. The long sentence would be much less effective without the setup.

Want one more example? Check out the 250-word sentence in Clark’s “Tracking the Great Long Sentence.”

5. Convey information efficiently.

Most sentences shouldn’t turn literary cartwheels. If your sentences shout, “Look, Ma! I’m writing!” they’re probably distracting the reader from the main event — the message.

“You don’t have to go for a home run in every sentence. It will exhaust you and the reader. I always tell my students that every paragraph needs an ox-like sentence that does the work. It should be simple and short. Don’t hide or disguise what you need to say for the sake of cleverness. Just tell me what I need to know.”

— James Magnuson, novelist

6. Create rhythm.

What does your copy sound like? Create music with your writing.

“I think of writing as being musical. Punctuation is the rhythm and the words are the melody.”

— Alice Steinbach, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

The short and long of varying sentence length

So make some sentences very short, others very long. One dramatic technique is to write a longer, more complex sentence, then follow it with a one- or two-word sentence or paragraph.

Enough said.

___

Sources: Arthur Browne, Beverly Weintraub and Heidi Evans, “Please Help Me Go On Living,” New York Daily News, Aug. 10, 2006. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning series

Roy Peter Clark, “Suspense … and the short sentence,” The Poynter Institute, Dec. 27, 2006

Roy Peter Clark, “Tracking the Great Long Sentence,” The Poynter Institute, Aug. 28, 2007

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Sentences too long? Use Microsoft Word’s “find” function to search for conjunctions. They include:

• And
• Or
• Also
• But
• So
• Then
• Plus

When one of my writing coachees tried this trick, she found 23 “and’s” in a 500-word article.

When you find them, see whether you can replace them with a period. Or, instead of replacing them, commence with a conjunction.

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