Get rid of long sentences
Learn how to break up long sentences to avoid confusing your reader and get your points across.
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:
A main clause
Zero or more subordinate clauses
Subordinate clauses convey extra information and can be removed as they are less ...