6 Ways To Shorten Your Sentences And Improve Your Writing
Are your sentences overly long and confusing? In this post, we write about six ways to shorten your sentences and improve your writing.
Long sentences can be dangerous. When our sentences are too long, we tend to lapse into the passive voice and we risk making tense and punctuation mistakes.
Run-on sentences also distract the writer and the reader. We tend to veer off course and forget the purpose of our communications. They also force the reader to work harder.
6 Ways To Shorten Your Sentences And Improve Your Writing
- Use readability statistics. Activate this on your computer and it’ll do the counting for you. Remember you want to work with an average number of words. It is also important to vary the length of your sentences. [Read: Why You Should Care About Readability Statistics]
- Count the commas. If you are not listing items, and your sentence has more than three commas, you should consider splitting the sentence.
- Cut unnecessary conjunctions. Conjunctions join sentences. Find them and decide if you can remove them and make two sentences instead of one.
- One thought per paragraph. We tend to read the first sentence in a paragraph and then we scan the rest of the paragraph. If you introduce second and third points later in the same paragraph, your reader may miss them.
- Remove redundant words. We add words that don’t add value. If you can remove a word from the sentence and it doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence you don’t need the word. [Read 19 Examples of Redundancy]
- Reduce your word count. Challenge yourself to cut 1/4 of the words. This will force you to evaluate each word. Do not cut crucial information, though. Make sure you have answered the five Ws and one H.
You will be able to structure your message if you plan your communication. The Inverted pyramid will help you decide what needs to go first. Think about what you want to say and what you want your reader to do after reading the message.
If you use these six ways to shorten your sentences, you will improve your writing.
Happy pruning.
More posts on sentences:
- How To Structure A Sentence
- 7 Tips For Writing Great Sentences
- The Importance Of Varying Sentence Length
- What Is A Sentence Fragment?
- Sentences – Simple, Compound, Complex
- The 4 Types Of Sentences
by Mia Botha
If you enjoyed this post, you will love:
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- 5 Ways To Write In A Genre And Still Be Original
- 4 Remarkably Simple Tips To Help You Write Anywhere
- Punctuation For Beginners: What Is Punctuation?
- Grammar For Beginners: All About Parts Of Speech
TOP TIP: If you want to learn how to write a book, sign up for our online course or join our Writers Write course in Johannesburg.
4 thoughts on “6 Ways To Shorten Your Sentences And Improve Your Writing”
Wikipedia says, the longest grammatically correct sentence is contained in Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. The sentence is composed of 1,292 words (In the 1951 Random House version). Another sentence that is often claimed to be the longest sentence ever written is Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in the James Joyce novel Ulysses, which contains a sentence of 4,391 words. However, this sentence is simply many sentences without punctuation. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club appears to hold the record at 13,955 words. It was inspired by Bohumil Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age: a Czech language novel that consisted of one great sentence.
The ability to embed structures within larger ones is called recursion. This also highlights the difference between linguistic performance and linguistic competence, because the language can support more variation than can reasonably be created or recorded. At least one linguistics textbook concludes that, in theory, “there is no longest English sentence”
that is a great idea
Thanks so much for the link to the online readability calculator 🙂 It’s much better than the one in Microsoft Word, which only works sometimes.
It’s a pleasure, Lyn. We’re happy that it helps.
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