Shorter sentences aren’t always easier to understand, whatever you may have heard from your composition teacher or writing software. The best writers generate meaning using sentence length as a stylistic tool.
I don’t advocate complex sentences for every kind of writing—billboards, shopping lists, and social media posts should be as direct as possible—but simplicity itself is a statement, and can imply your subject is simple or monochromatic. Subtle writing is better for expressing subtleties.
It’s been said, and I agree, that unclear writing often is a sign of unclear thinking. But a long sentence can be just as clear as a string of short ones.
I have rules for making long sentences clear.
English sentences work best with the subject and the verb near the beginning (the actor and action words).
This rule derives from the mental process of reading. Reading is decoding. The meaning of each word depends on the other words in the sentence. The primary keys to that code are the subject and verb, and decoding is easiest if you have the keys up front.
Why is that true? Imagine your words are stepping stones leading to a destination, which is the meaning you hope to convey. You can get there most efficiently by giving readers each stone in the right order, allowing them to lay the stones down step by step along the journey, rather than forcing them to carry stones in a bag while waiting to learn the correct sequence of placement at the end.
The cognitive load of reading relates to the weight of the bag of stones you ask the reader to carry. Big words are heavy, but that’s OK if they aren’t in the bag for long. And you can keep words out of the bag by providing them exactly when needed.
If you often ask your reader to carry a bag of stones, you do need to write short sentences, because carrying stones around is tiring and you need to keep the bag small. But if you hand the reader each stone at the right moment, he or she can travel a long way before reaching a period, because the load is light.
This leads me to another observation. A sentence can continue through many clauses—which can be details or asides, and are usually set out by commas or dashes—if the clauses attach logically, explain one another, are clearly connected to their own verbs, and descend from the beginning to the end of the sentence by narrowing from broad to fine-grained concepts, like stairsteps leading downward into specificity.
If you want to take your readers on an arduous journey, carefully plan the steps. The path may be easier through long, well-crafted sentences that each travel a good way toward your destination, rather than the alternative, of jumping among many shorter segments that go only part of the way, with the continual starts and stops of the short, choppy sentences many editors today prefer.
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