November 11, 2011

Shorter Sentences and Faster Downloads

25 words makes a good maximum length for most business sentences. So what do you do when a sentence starts mushrooming beyond that comfortable target length?

Start by imagining you’d written this 33-word sentence about Adobe’s cloud-computing software:

Larger businesses, particularly over the past decade, have become used to subscribing to software rather than buying it — using Salesforce.com for managing customer relationships, for example, or Box.net for storage and collaboration.

Concise writing can start with rearranging a sentence’s main ideas as a series of bullet points, with one idea per item:

• Particularly over the past decade, larger businesses have changed their software use
• They have become used to subscribing to software rather than buying it
• Two examples are using Salesforce.com for managing customer relationships or Box.net for storage and collaboration.

Teasing out the ideas as separate list items makes them easy to recombine with new transitions:

Particularly over the past decade, larger businesses have become used to subscribing to software rather than buying it. Two examples are using Salesforce.com for managing customer relationships or Box.net for storage and collaboration.

These new sentences are 18 and 17 words long — the perfect length for a busy customer or client to skim, absorb, and move on from.

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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.