Get rid of long sentences

Having long sentences within a paragraph can be confusing for a reader. With long sentences, your reader might struggle to engage with your ideas and will struggle to follow what you are trying to say.

Luckily, there are a few easy ways to divide a long sentence into a shorter one. These ways are listed below.

Focus on a single idea

To break a sentence into smaller, more coherent bits, focus on a single idea or thought.

For example, consider the following paragraph:

• When working with data, your analysis and insights are only as good as your data, so if you’re performing data analysis with dirty data, your organization can’t make efficient and effective decisions with that data, that’s why data cleaning is a critical part of data management because it allows you to validate that you have a high quality of data.

As you can notice, this sentence is quite long and is talking about three different ideas. We can fix this by placing each idea in a separate sentence as follows:

• When working with data, your analysis and insights are only as good as your data. If you’re performing data analysis with dirty data, your organization can’t make efficient and effective decisions with that data. Data cleaning is a critical part of data management that allows you to validate that you have high-quality of data.

Remove subordinate clauses

A clause is an independent and logical fragment of a sentence containing the main actor and action. Every sentence has:

1. A main clause

2. Zero or more subordinate clauses

Subordinate clauses convey extra information and can be removed as they are less important than main clauses.

For example, in the sentence “Python is an interpreted programming language, which was invented in 1991.”:

• The main clause is “Python is an interpreted programming language”

• The subordinate clause is, “which was invented in 1991”.

If we take out the subordinate clauses, the main clause “Python is an interpreted programming language” will convey all the necessary information.

A dependent clause can be identified by words like which, that, because, whose, until, unless, since, etc.

Put the most important information first

Each sentence should be written with the most important information at the start, and the least important information at the end.

This is a rule that should be applied at the sentence level and at the article level. You should write as if your reader has is too busy to read what you have written and is only able to quickly scan the start of your article/paragraph/sentence.

For example, take this sentence: “The symbolic representation of the data in a grid format is a table.”

The purpose of this sentence is a bit hard to understand and it is quite boring to read. This is because the point of the sentence (to define “table”) is not mentioned until the very end and so readers will not understand the significance of the last sentence until they are nearly on top of the next one.

Now, take a look at the sentence again:

“A table is a symbolic representation of data in a grid format.”

• This version immediately states that the purpose of the sentence is to define a “table” using the words “A table is.”

• Then, it completes the previously defined purpose using the words “a symbolic representation of data in a grid format.”

You see how much clearer this sounds? This is because it is easier for our brain to think through logical next steps when information is presented in a logical way.

Convert long sentences into lists

Long sentences can sometimes be broken into a list to increase understandability. Consider the following sentence as an example:

• “To alter the usual flow of a loop, you may use either a  statement (which hops you out of the current loop) or a  statement (which skips past the remainder of the current iteration of the current loop).”

This sentence can be broken down as follows:

• To alter the usual flow of a loop, use one of the following statements:

  • break, which hops you out of the current loop.

  • continue, which skips past the remainder of the current iteration of the current loop.

Whenever you see the “or” conjunction in a sentence, consider refactoring that sentence into a bulleted list.

Keep it simple

Learning when to keep a word or phrase and when to cut it can be tricky. If a word or phrase is obscuring the meaning of the sentence — cut it. Making your sentence longer is not the same as making your sentence more valuable. Let’s take a look at some sentences that demonstrate this:

• I really love her very long blue dress; it is quite beautiful.

This sentence is riddled with modifiers that make the sentence clunky and unenjoyable to read. Let’s cut some of this down:

• I love her long blue dress; it’s beautiful.

Words such as “really”, “quite”, and “very” don’t add new meaning to the sentence. Cut back on using words that don’t enhance the meaning of your sentence.

If you want to make your sentence more valuable, focus on using strong verbs and keep adjectives and adverbs to a minimum. If you are going to use these, search for a modifier that is powerful enough that you don’t need more than one.

For example, instead of saying:

• She ran super quickly to the finish line, ahead of everyone by a lot.

Try:

• She sprinted to the finish line, significantly ahead of everyone.

We cut down the sentence by replacing the adverbs “super” and “quickly” with a stronger verb “sprinted.” We also cut out “by a lot” and chose just one adverb “significantly.”

Hyperbole and exaggerations should be avoided in technical writing. For example, it would not be appropriate to say that a project you worked on was able to achieve huge/colossal/mammoth improvements; instead, you should give it a figure, such as 4-fold or 5x, to describe the project's growth.

Get rid of unnecessary words

A lot of long sentences can be fixed by taking out redundant words that take up space without conveying necessary information.

Let’s take the following sentence in consideration:

• An input value greater than 100 causes the triggering of logging.

Here, “triggering of logging” is redundant. and if we change the sentence to,

• An input value greater than 100 triggers logging.

We can see that the sentence became shorter and no important information has been taken out.

Simplify clauses and phrases

Reduce clauses and phrases to make simpler sentences. You can:

• Change compound sentences to simple sentences.

Ex: Read these sentences aloud, which one sounds better?

Compound: “We will accept the returned clothes, and we will credit your account.”

Simple: “We will accept the returned clothes and credit your account.”

• Change dependent clauses to phrases.

Ex: Read these sentences aloud, which one sounds better?

Compound: “Do your homework today so that you will not miss the deadline”

Simple: “Do your homework today to avoid missing the deadline.”

• Punctuate correctly. Avoid sentence fragments.

Ex: Read these sentences aloud, which one sounds better?

Fragment: “Because I need a break.”

Sentence: “I need a break.”

• Use parallelism. Parallelism is when similar ideas are expressed in similar grammatical constructions. If done correctly, parallelism will help the reader to understand the relationship between similar facts and ideas.

Ex: Read these sentences aloud, which one sounds better?

Incorrect: “Not only is she good at reading, but also her writing is excellent.”

Correct: “She is not only a good reader, but​ she is also a good writer.”