Shorter Sentences — Cookbook Style

Cookbooks can teach business writers a thing or two about presenting ideas clearly.

Take a look at this slightly revised, 38-word sentence about iPad cooking apps. It’s about twice the length it should be for comfortable reading:

Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy['s] book, The Geometry of Pasta, illustrated entirely in crisp black and white, with all pasta shapes drawn true to size, met Ms. Hildebrand’s goal of designing a visually informative cookbook without any photographs.

Try treating this sentence the way you’d write out the ingredients for a recipe. First, chop the flowing lines of text into a bulleted list with one item per idea:

  • Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy’s book is The Geometry of Pasta
  • It’s illustrated entirely in crisp black and white, with all pasta shapes drawn true to size
  • It met Ms. Hildebrand’s goal of designing a visually informative cookbook without any photographs

Once you cut and assemble these related ideas, it’s easy to blend and remix them. 26 and 14 words make for a more appetizing presentation than the single 38-word heap of a sentence above:

Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy book, The Geometry of Pasta, is illustrated entirely in crisp black and white with all pasta shapes drawn true to size. It met Ms. Hildebrand’s goal of designing a visually informative cookbook without any photographs.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes one chapter on sentence structure and two more on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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