{"id":18587,"date":"2018-09-01T04:25:41","date_gmt":"2018-09-01T08:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wyliecomm.com\/?page_id=18587"},"modified":"2024-01-01T08:09:38","modified_gmt":"2024-01-01T12:09:38","slug":"good-sentence-length","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.wyliecomm.com\/writing-tips\/what-is-readability\/ideal-sentence-length\/good-sentence-length\/","title":{"rendered":"Quotes on good sentence length"},"content":{"rendered":"

What writers and others say<\/h2>\n

\"Good

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\u201cNo iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Isaac Babel, Russian journalist<\/h6>\n
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\u201cI\u2019m not here to set a words-per-sentence limit. I just think many of you out there are writing or editing sentences that are 10 percent to 20 percent fatter than they ought to be. If you\u2019d be tougher on yourself about how many clauses you can cram into a sentence, and about breaking one monster sentence into two, your stories would read faster, shorter. Readers would have an easier time getting all the way through them.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Bob Baker, deputy metropolitan editor, Los Angeles Times<\/em> and creator of Newsthinking<\/h6>\n
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\u201cThe hardest thing about writing, in a sense, is not writing. I mean, the sentence is not designed to show you off, you know. It is not supposed to be \u2018Look at me! Look, no hands!\u2019 it\u2019s supposed to be a pipeline between the reader and you. One condition of the sentence is to write so well that no one notices that you\u2019re writing.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 James Baldwin, American novelist and playwright<\/h6>\n
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\u201cPeople read long sentences quickly. They read short sentences more slowly. Short sentences are power points in your copy.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Jacqui Banaszynski, associate managing editor at The Seattle Times<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cThe book wasn\u2019t written in smoothly flowing prose. Some of the sentences careened dangerously off track without ever coming up with something so simple as a subject and a predicate. Alice\u2019s free-form punctuation also made for tough going.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Joanna Brady, a character in J.A. Jance\u2019s Outlaw Mountain<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cI hate the way [the semicolon] looks. Like a colon that\u2019s had a polyp removed.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Roy Peter Clark, The Poynter Institute\u2019s senior scholar and author of Writing Tools<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cIf a writer wants the reader to think something is the absolute truth, the writer should render it in the shortest possible sentence. Trust me.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Roy Peter Clark, Poynter Institute vice president and senior scholar and author of Writing Tools<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cA rambling, unwieldy sentence generally hangs from an inert, vague, actionless verb.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Claire Kehrwald Cook, author of Line by Line<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cThe sentences were lean and angular, as if they\u2019d been scratched onto the page with a needle, and the story moved along as if it had been prodded by a sharp tip.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Loren D. Estleman, novelist, in A Smile on the Face of the Tiger<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cAnyone who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable and question whether it is necessary.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 H.W. Fowler, English lexicographer<\/h6>\n
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\u201cYou become a good writer as you become a good joiner: by planning down your sentences.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Anatole France, French poet, journalist and novelist<\/h6>\n
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\u201cSimple, short sentences don\u2019t always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it vital and alive. Virtually every page is a cliffhanger and you\u2019ve got to force them to turn it.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Theodore Giesel, aka Dr. Seuss<\/h6>\n
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Martin “Amis has loosened his belt, and his slangy, scattershot prose veers toward self-parody. Sentences are either impossibly short or impossibly long. Commas, colons, parentheses and dashes crawl all over the page like flesh-eating microbes.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Jeff Giles, senior editor of Newsweek\u2019s<\/em> Arts & Entertainment section<\/h6>\n
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\u201cMy thought for the day is that the semicolon rarely helps a passage; usually it creates little more than clutter. This is my second thought for the day: The semicolon rarely helps a passage. Usually it creates little more than clutter. The period, believe me, is the best friend a writer will ever have.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 James J. Kilpatrick, journalist and author of The Writer\u2019s Art<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“These interesting objects, which apparently you have never encountered before, are known as periods. You would do well to use them.” <\/h5>\n
\u2014 City editor to young journalist James J. Kilpatrick<\/h6>\n
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\u201cI like to use as few commas as possible so that sentences will go down in one swallow without touching the sides.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Florence King, author of Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cYou don\u2019t have to go for a home run in every sentence. It will exhaust you and the reader. I always tell my students that every paragraph needs an ox-like sentence that does the work. It should be simple and short. Don\u2019t hide or disguise what you need to say for the sake of cleverness. Just tell me what I need to know.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 James Magnuson, novelist and playwright<\/h6>\n
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\u201cFrank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a \u2018New York sentence.\u2019 In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don\u2019t pause to contemplate.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Sam Roberts, reporter for The New York Times<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cI have fantasies of writing an essay punctuated solely with periods and commas. I seldom see a piece of prose that shouldn\u2019t, I feel, have more periods and fewer of those obtrusive marks that seem to have usurped its natural place.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Paul Robinson, author, The Philosophy of Punctuation<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cPeriods and commas are lovely because they are simple. They force the writer to express his ideas directly, to eliminate unnecessary hedges, to forgo smart-aleck asides.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Paul Robinson, author, The Philosophy of Punctuation<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cMore than half of the semicolons one sees, I would estimate, should be periods, and probably another quarter should be commas.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Paul Robinson, author, The Philosophy of Punctuation<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cWhen Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life. Old age is more like a semicolon.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Kurt Vonnegut, author of such novels as Slaughterhouse-Five<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cRemember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences that were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Kurt Vonnegut, American novelist<\/h6>\n
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\u201cWe\u2019d all do well to use more periods.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cThere\u2019s not much to be said about the period, except that most writers don\u2019t reach it soon enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well<\/em><\/h6>\n
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