Don't be afraid of long sentences
Short sentences are good, but sometimes they are just not enough
A typical and good piece of writing advice is to use short sentences. It helps your writing by nudging you to be objective and fluid. But some ideas are complex or nuanced enough to require more words to communicate.
One solution is to break it in smaller sentences, but then you risk making it unnatural, with artificially short sentences that do not stand on their own. It is a valuable skill to know how to write long sentences that are easy to read and understand.
A good exercise to check if a long sentence - more than 20 words - is well written is to read it aloud. If the text does not lead you to pause in the right places and you sound repetitive, boring or even running out of breath, then you have a bad long sentence.
Some guidelines to write good long sentences
Respect the proximity of the subject and its verb. Do not include long phrases or clauses between them.
Keep the main topic in the beginning — something I mentioned in the last email about focus. Any introductory clause should be short. Or, even better, moved to the end.
Avoid words like who, that, which, whose, where, when. These are relative pronouns used to create relative clauses. Relative clauses just add more information about the main clause. You can make them regular phrases, adding information more fluidly.
Let's work on an example
If we want to save development time, that is already an important issue as we are having a hard time hiring new developers and we only have one iOS developer in the company, who is on vacation, React Native, that allow us to write once and run on both app stores, is a good choice, for this project, that is an MVP.
There are five things we want to communicate here:
Suggest React Native for the project
Remind that the project is an MVP
Establish the main benefit as saving development time
Justify the benefit with the lack of new hires
And with the iOS developer being on vacation.
That's a lot to communicate, and it might make sense to keep it all in one sentence. We need a long sentence for that, but 62 words are way too much for it. So the first step is to cut the relative pronouns and other words and rephrase it to get a better rhythm.
Here is a better version of it:
A good choice for saving development time on this project, an MVP, is React Native, a language that you can to write once and run on both app stores, a good thing considering the hard time we have hiring new developers and with our only iOS developer on vacation.
This version has 49 words, a significant improvement. It has a balanced rhythm while reading it aloud. It still has a big issue though; the information is not prioritized. Everything is in there, but the reader can’t tell what is most important.
A crucial piece of information — the suggestion, “React Native” — is used as an object, rather than subject and is pushed to later in the sentence by one of the justifications. The subject is “A good choice” which has no intrinsic meaning. There is no emphasis in any particular bit actually, so it ends up sounding obtuse. Let's try to improve it even more.
React Native is a good choice for this project, an MVP, to save development time, an important issue as we are having a hard time hiring new developers and with our only iOS developer on vacation.
Much better with its 36 words, as short as it can be, but no less. It has a good rhythm, it presents the main topic right at the beginning, and adds the extra information on a logical and prioritized sequence.
