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Home > Guidelines > 1. Trim that Text! > 1c. Make some sentences short. |
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1c. Make some sentences short.
Too often inexperienced writers think that writing calls for long sentences rather than short ones--just as they believe that writing calls for fancy words rather than plain ones. Both notions are wrong. –Kolln(2003) In fact, there is nothing wrong with a long sentence if its subjects and verbs match its characters and actions. But even so, when we match subjects and verbs with characters and actions, we almost always write a shorter sentence. ...What counts is not the number of words in a sentence, but how easily we get from beginning to end while understanding everything in between. –Williams(1990). See bibliography: Horton (1990), Kolln (2003), Krug (2000), Levine (1997), Morkes & Nielsen (1997, 1998), Nielsen (1997a, 1997b, 1999f), Spyridakis (2000), Sullivan (1998), Williams (1990). |
Other ways to trim that text 1a. Cut any paper-based text by 50%. 1d. Make most paragraphs short. 1f. Move vital but tangential or supplemental material. 1g. Convert repeating categories of information into tables. 1h. Beware of cutting so far that you make the text ambiguous. Resources on brevity Heuristic Online Text (HOT) Evaluation for Brevity
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