My infant grandson is visiting; he has reminded me of a basic truth about business writing. He just started eating solids, so we’ve been spooning baby food into a hungry little mouth.
Imagine yourself feeding sweet potatoes to a babe. You put the food on the spoon, put the spoon in the mouth and, like magic, the sweet potatoes disappear. Now imagine that you start to feel impatient and think, “How long is it going to take to feed this kid his food?” Then you make the fateful decision: You dig the spoon into the jar and pile it high with sweet potatoes. You pry open the little mouth and shove in the orange goo. Those of you who have fed babies know already what happens. The extra mush comes dribbling out, all over the chin, the bib, the fingers, and possibly onto the clothing of the baby and the person who is feeding him. You have not saved any time at all. You’ve made a mess and you still have a hungry baby.
A similar principle applies in business writing. Since the 1940s, extensive research has been done on how much people retain of what they read. Rudolf Flesch was a pioneer in this study. He discovered that the ideal average length for an English sentence is from 10 to 17 words. I say “average” because sometimes you cannot avoid writing a long sentence. In our business writing trainings, I advise that if you write a longer sentence, you sandwich it between several shorter sentences. This keeps the average sentence length low. (MS Word calculates average sentence length when it calculates readability statistics.)
A sentence is like a spoonful of information. Writing is like feeding information into the mind of your reader. Like the baby with his food, the reader can only take in so much information at once. If you try to cram in too much information, it falls right out of that person’s brain. A healthy spoonful of information is about 10 to 17 words.
When writing copy, emails, letters, or proposals, spoon information into your readers’ minds in the right quantities. Then your ideas are likely to hit the mark. Try to heap 20, 30, or 40 words into a sentence and your ideas are likely to end up anywhere but in your reader’s mind. Learn from my grandson – offer a little good stuff at a time and everyone will be satisfied.
PS: The average sentence length of the first draft of this post was 16.8. Too high. I tweaked it a bit and got to 13.1 words per sentence. That’s what it is now.