The ideal average length of a sentence is around 20 words. You have probably noticed that business writers often exceed this. (You can measure your average sentence length using MS Word’s readability statistics function, which is accessed through the Review/Editing tab.)
A client recently showed me a writing sample with an average sentence length of 37.5 words. If the average was 37.5 words, the document must have included some sentences that were upward of 40 words long. Such sentences are virtually unreadable.
But what if you or someone you know has written a brontosaurus of a sentence? How do you cut it down to size? To chop up the uber-sentence, you must break it into multiple shorter sentences.
How to Chop Up a Monster
Here is where knowledge of independent and dependent clauses is useful. A clause is a group of words that contains both a noun and a verb, a subject and a predicate. An independent clause can stand alone as a complete sentence; a dependent clause feels incomplete and relies on its connection to an independent clause for coherence. Dependent clauses are introduced by words like that, which, since, who, because, although, when, and so forth.
A 50-word monster is composed of many clauses – some independent clauses linked by conjunctions like and, or, but, so, or yet – and some dependent clauses. Creating multiple sentences requires you to find the sentences hiding in the behemoth and turn them into self-respecting sentences of their own.
Declare Your Independence
If you have written a long sentence and are looking for ways to break it into shorter sentences, watch for the links between dependent and independent clauses. See if you can tinker with the dependent clauses and turn them into freestanding sentences. Declare their independence!
For example, take this 42-word-long example turned in by a participant in a Worktalk writing training:
It’s imperative that management works on closing the gap between what it promises and what it’s delivering and increasing the exposure of these amenities to our customers so that they can experience the full range of benefits our company’s brand is offering.
To rebuild this sentence, we need to see how it was structured. The independent clause is it’s imperative, underlined below. The words in bold are the places where independent and dependent clauses were cobbled together.
It’s imperative that management works on closing the gap between what it promises and what it’s delivering and increasing the exposure of these amenities to our customers so that they can experience the full range of benefits our company’s brand is offering.
How can we break apart this sentence?
First, we can ditch it’s imperative and replace it with must. This gives us:
Management must work on closing the gap between what it promises and what it delivers.
The next step is to tinker with the following clauses to make them into a complete sentence. This would yield:
We need to increase our customers’ exposure to these amenities so that they can experience the full range of benefits our company’s brand offers.
Instead of the original long sentence, we now have two shorter sentences whose combined average sentence length is 20 words. The new version reads:
Management must work on closing the gap between what it promises and what it delivers. We need to increase our customers’ exposure to these amenities so they can experience the full range of benefits our brand offers.
By learning to distinguish between the independent and the dependent parts of a sentence and playing with ways to separate or recombine them, you can carve up even the most humongous sentence in several sentences of manageable length.
Did someone send you a linguistic behemoth? Please send me the hairy sentences you receive so I can add them to my collection! Find me at lizd@worktalk.com.