Get Rid of Long Sentences
Explore techniques to improve sentence clarity by breaking long sentences into shorter ones, removing redundant words, and focusing on a single idea. Understand how simplifying sentence structure enhances reader comprehension and engagement in technical writing.
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 sentence:
- Confusing → “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:
- Easy to follow → “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