“There’s nothing wrong with well-made, strongly constructed, purposeful long sentences.
But long sentences often tend to collapse or break down or become opaque or trip over their awkwardness.
They’re pasted together with false syntax
And rely on words like “with” and “as” to lengthen the sentence.
They’re short on verbs, weak in syntactic vigor,
Full of floating, unattached phrases, often out of position.
And worse – the end of the sentence commonly forgets its beginning,
As if the sentence were a long, weary road to the wrong place.
Writing short sentences restores clarity, the directness of subject and verb.
It forces you to discard the strong elements of long sentences,
Like relative pronouns and subordinate clauses,
And the weak ones as well:
Prepositional chains, passive constructions, and dependent phrases.
Writing short sentences will help you write strong, balanced sentences of any length.
Strong, lengthy sentences are really just strong, short sentences joined in various ways.” | Verilyn Klinkenborg in “Several short sentences about writing”
A beautiful reminder of the importance of starting from the basics.
