More about shorter sentences

With very little effort, you can produce clear writing by breaking long sentences into more-readable short sentences. In an earlier post, I showed an example of this way to achieve clear writing.

Here’s another example. On the ClairMail web site, we see this very long (47-word) sentence:

“ClairMail System infrastructure resides on-premise or in a managed service environment and seamlessly and securely integrates with its back-end systems without requiring any new software on mobile phones - enabling customers to actively access their accounts and conduct transactions while allowing brokerages to directly access their customers.”

To be fair, we should acknowledge two things that make the sentence fairly readable in spite of its length: (1) the sentence structure is good; (2) the dash makes the sentence feel like two sentences. However, it is an easy task to break the sentence into four sentences:

The ClairMail System infrastructure resides on-premise or in a managed service environment. It seamlessly and securely integrates with its back-end systems without requiring any new software on mobile phones. Customers get direct access to their accounts. Brokers get direct access to their customers.

Not only easier to read, but also snappier.

The Takeaway: Very long sentences (say, 30 words and up), are almost always unnecessarily long. Break them up and you’ll feel a big improvement in readability. So will your readers. Remember, just because our readers are educated and can read sentences this long doesn’t mean we should make them do it all the time.