IF you do a word count of your sentences, you’ll find some running thirty, forty, fifty words—too many for today’s impatient reader to grasp. And I suspect you’ll find only a few running ten to twenty words. Yet shorter sentences can give readers a bit of relief and draw attention to their unencumbered content.
FRAGMENTS
Sentence fragments, disallowed by rigid writers and grousing grammarians, often mimic speech and thus pick up the pace of your writing. Unexpected, they command attention, so you should draw that attention to big points and comments.
All the crusading doesn’t reassure the public. Just the opposite.
The full sentence would have been: Instead, it does just the opposite. Stripping the first three words from the front and leaving the fragment drives the reader straight to the point.
And on and on, line by line by line. The range of reference is staggering.
What users have in mind instead is a half-way house in which information is held and often processed on large, shared machines, but viewed and used on personal ones, and accessed via an open network that encourages all the collaboration, communication and information-sharing that management theorists hold so dear. In a word, the Internet.
Crash. Stockmarket bulls can act as brave as they like but they cannot deny the terror that this simple word strikes in their breasts.
TO START A PARAGRAPH OR POINT
Try giving your reader some relief with a five- or ten-word sentence. Like the fragment, it attracts attention. So, use it to open an argument. One of the strongest positions for the short sentence is at the beginning of a paragraph.
Documentary films are a worry. First of all, there’s the term “documentary” itself, which was thought clumsy by the very man who invented it, John Grierson.
This short, provocative sentence prompts the reader to ask, Why?
It is quite an achievement. Though Boris Yeltsin is erratic in temperament and unsound in body, and though he had presided over a period of change in which most Russians have grown poorer, they have re-elected him.
Greenpeace used no half-measures. Claiming that old growth forests and many species of wild life were being wiped out, it called for all clear-cutting to stop, and no more new forest roads.
But others aren’t so sure. “We have yet to find evidence that the introduction of new technology in schools raises test scores,” says the Abell Foundation’s Kate Walsh. Even some advocates, like consultant Margaret Riel, concede that test scores don’t prove the case for computer networking.
TO FINISH A PARAGRAPH OR POINT
Finish a paragraph with a short declarative sentence to reinforce your point, put it in a broad perspective, or create a bridge to the next paragraph. You can also inject a bit of your humorous or skeptical self.
Ordinary people may not dine in three-star restaurants, but they have enough to eat; they may not wear Bruno Maglis, but they do not go barefoot; they may not live in Malibu, but they have roofs over their heads. Yet it was not always thus.
Here, the writer is setting up the coming paragraph.
It’s not that publishers are irrational or corrupt. They’re just cursed.
But this tale of two schools shows that it is possible for poor, inner-city children to get a good education in an orderly and happy school. The things that seem to matter—good management, well-designed lessons, careful planning and high expectations—are harder to achieve than simply throwing money at schools or cutting class sizes. But it can be done.
It’s not hard to find the winner in the Sudanese war, or in any war in Africa: it is the microbes that always emerge victorious. Infectious disease flowers in conditions of anarchy.
PAIRS AND TRIOS
Two or more short sentences add cadence. They also separate ideas that would otherwise be more closely linked by a conjunction in a single sentence.
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
The period after invention stops the reader momentarily, abruptly separating what follows. Compare the effect with: Literature is invention, and fiction is fiction. Far less clear that you’re dealing with two separate ideas, not two linked ones.
Busy on two phones at once trying to stem disaster, you had no time to turn and look. You didn’t need to. You felt him.
We detest both words. We spit them at each other with the fury of hissing geese. We duck and dodge them.
I came. I saw. I conquered.
Of course, Cicero’s tricolon for Caesar.