Long sentences come at you like hissing snakes, says Martin Cutts in his Oxford Guide to Plain English. He prescribes an average sentence length of 15-20 words. GOV.UK says they try to not go beyond 25 words.
A study conducted by the American Press Institute found that readers understood 90% of the information when sentences were at 14 words and less than 10% when they were at 43 words.
That’s a lot of research stacked up in favour of shorter sentences (and there’s more, by the way). But remember this is the “average sentence length”. Which means that not every sentence needs to be short.
But what is it about long sentences that makes them so difficult?
For one, it’s too many ideas crammed into one sentence. It’s as if the author is breathlessly gushing out everything they have to say, afraid that if they slow down they might just lose the reader.
But they have already lost the reader by the time the reader is past the 30th, 50th, or, God forbid, the 100th word. If at all the brave reader makes it to the last word, they have no clue how they ended up there.
Secondly, it just doesn’t seem like the author is considerate to the reader’s needs.
In the image below, you will see an excerpt from a letter written by a forest department official to another official in the town municipality. It says that some trees have been considered dangerous, are coming in the way of road expansion, and hence need to be cut. It asks the town municipality to cut the trees, prepare a list of the trees cut, and ferry them to the forest depot.
Now, this letter is between two bureaucrats. So you may say let them wallow in their own verbosity. But this is a public document. People have the right to understand it. And, have no doubt about it, the officer would write in the same way even if they were addressing members of the public.
I had blogged about the letter and its context some time ago. Recently, Vikram Hegde, a Supreme Court advocate and plain language enthusiast, pinged me about this post. He said,
“I have been noticing this specific type of unpunctuated writing in Indian languages, in government documents of all types. We often see a sequence of events over 20 years being described in one sentence, in an FIR or a chargesheet.
I used to think that this happens because the authority is setting out the circumstances in which it is deciding to take a step. It wants to enumerate all the circumstances and reasons in the same sentence so as to directly link it to the action. But I have come to realize that authorities utilize this form of complex writing to actively avoid scrutiny of their decisions. Writing a jumble of reasons enables them to avoid tying the decision down to any one reason which may or may not be valid or applicable. Bureaucratese is active avoidance of accountability!”
Very valid point! If you are ever questioned about something, there’s all that gobbledygook you can hide behind.
It’s not surprising that long sentence-paragraphs such as these are written by people in a position of authority. When you don’t understand them, they believe they have some power over you. They can tell you you have no idea how the government works, or law works, or some such thing.
Thirdly, it takes a lot of time to understand these sentences. The reader has to re-read, break up the sentence, and organize the information in their head to make any sense of it. So the reader is rewriting and editing as they go – something authors have no business asking of the reader.
Fourthly, errors can creep in when the sentence has gone out of control. In the example I have used here, there are quite a few typos and spelling mistakes. Obviously, the author is themselves so drained by the burden of writing such sentences that they couldn’t be bothered with mundane things such as spelling. Sometimes, these errors can further muddle up the reader.
So, my friend, want to write clearly? Start with writing shorter sentences.
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