Ideal ratio of long to short sentences?
Is there an ideal ratio of long to short sentences? A tip in John R. Trimble’s Writing with Style made me ponder this question.
Trimble says:
As a rule of thumb, whenever you’ve written three longish sentences in a row, make your fourth a short one. And don’t fear the super-short sentence. It’s arresting. Sometimes just a single word will be plenty long.
It’s a good idea to vary your sentence length. Same-length sentences—even if they’re short, not long—grow monotonous.
A short sentence—like “it’s arresting” in Trimble’s tip—gives readers a chance to breathe. Be kind to your readers.
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Susan,
I agree that it’s good advice to mix up sentence length. Then again, rules of thumb have to be used with care.
When writing posts for a WordPress site, I’ve noted the flags raised by a plugin like Yoast SEO. The advice is often very useful, such as breaking up a long stretch of text with sub-headings. But they have other rules that can be stultifying, such as having a certain percentage of sentences linked by transition words and making sure that keywords are used in the headline, first sentence and sub-headings.
Maybe the best approach is to take note of these rules but to leave off when they interfere with a good, natural-sounding rhythm for an article.
Barry,
I like the way you think! There’s truth to the saying that “rules are made to be broken.”
That Yoast transition word rule drives me crazy, too.