Use Short Sentences

In this article, we discuss why we should use short sentences in order for our writing to be clear.

Ever seen a beautiful building? Is it made up of one large continuous block of concrete?

Absolutely not!

Rather, such an intricate building is made up of smaller and less intricate single units called bricks. Though simple, when skilfully combined, these building blocks form an intricate building.

In the same way, every piece of writing, no matter how complex, is made up from single building blocks called sentences. It is these simple sentences that eventually make a great piece of writing. So writing short, clear sentences will help you produce a great piece of writing.

Why is it good to write short, clear sentences?

When you write very long sentences, they tend to become complicated, and you may find it a challenge to handle them properly.

In the end, your whole writing will be compromised, and make you appear like a very bad writer.

Shorter sentences, on the other hand, are easier to handle. They are clear and straight to the point.

Before you can appreciate why shorter sentences are better, you need to understand what a sentence is:

A sentence is not just a group of words arranged in any order; rather, these words should express a thought, idea, or feeling that is complete.

N.B: A sentence can also be just one word. For example, the expression: “Go!” is a sentence because it expresses a complete thought.

A normal sentence consists of two parts:

The Subject
The Predicate

The Subject is the doer of the action, or the person or thing the sentence is about. This subject is usually a noun, i.e. a named thing. The predicate refers to the rest of the words in a sentence, excluding the subject. The predicate is that part of the sentence that contains the verb or describes the action that the subject performs.

In short, a sentence usually has a subject - doer of action, and a verb – the action being done by the subject.

For example, in the sentence below, the group of words in bold are the subject; the rest are the predicate:

Tom the hunter is hunting for deer in the forest

Therefore, for a sentence to be clear, the subject and the verb should be easily identified.

Take a look a the sentence below:

Tom went hunting

The above sentence is clear because the subject (Tom) and verb (hunting) can easily be identified.

Sentences become unclear when they have multiple subjects and verbs:

Tom, laughing merrily, and Sarah, frowning, went hunting deer in the pine forests, and eventually brought back a few deer, gasping.

The length of this sentence makes it quite complex. It has a plural subject, i.e. Tom and Sarah. These subjects are performing a variety of actions. Since the sentence is very long, it is a bit difficult to identify who is doing what. For instance, who is gasping? Is it Tom and Sarah, or is it the deer? Contrast the above sentence with the following:

Tom, laughing, and Sarah, frowning, went hunting deer in the pine forest. Gasping, they eventually they brought back a few deer.

Things are now clearer because we have broken up the sentence, creating two separate sentences. By breaking long, complex sentences into smaller parts, your writing will sound clearer and clearer.

The whole point in writing clear sentences is to ensure that the reader can easily identify the subject and the verb. I am not saying writing short sentences is guaranteed to achieve this, but it will make it far much easier.

We could break up the above sentence further in order to clearly identify the subject and verb:

Tom, laughing, and Sarah, frowning, went hunting deer in the forest. They eventually brought back a few deer. Tom and Sarah were both gasping.

As I have demonstrated above, shorter sentences where the subject and verb are easily identified will make your whole writing sound clearer.

However, if you have to use long sentences, you can make them clearer by placing commas, semicolons or colons in the right places. This ‘splits’ the sentences into smaller, manageable chunks.

But you will lose too much time tweaking your long sentences so that they make sense. You will save so much time if you simply write short sentences!

You want to be a good writer? Don’t complicate things! Use short sentences!

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