Avoid Complicated Sentences

Have you ever found yourself reading something complicated, straining to understand, when your brain suddenly goes "blue screen"? You go back to the beginning of the passage and start over again. You reread the material, not because it was so enjoyable going through it the first time, but because you just couldn't fuse it into anything that made sense. Usually when that happens, you have run up against a poorly constructed, overly complicated sentence, and your brain simply couldn't decode it. The sentence was too complex to make sense.

Sentence complexity is a function of two elements: length and syntactic structure. Length is simply a matter of how many words your sentences contain. Keep them short. Strive for an average sentence length of fifteen to eighteen words for maximum readability. Here's an example of a sentence that's way too long:

For this program, it is proposed that the kick-off meeting be one day in length with the first half of the day consisting of the following activities: [list follows]

It is proposed that . . . ? By whom? One day in length? As opposed to what— one day in width? This bloated sentence is bordering on silliness. Here's a rewrite that cuts it from twenty-seven words to eleven and gets rid of several other problems, too:

We propose a one-day kick-off meeting. The first half will cover: [list follows]

Syntactic structure is a matter of how many embedded elements the sentence contains. The more complexity in your sentences, the more difficult they are to decode. Please understand that I'm not suggesting you write in a Dick-and-Jane style. But unnecessary complexity and sloppy syntax won't help you win any deals, because they are likely to confuse, even alienate, the reader.

Often the quickest way to simplify your writing is to break a long, complicated sentence into a couple of shorter, simpler ones. For example, look at this sentence which appeared in the executive summary of a proposal written by a major consulting firm:

The dimensionality of expected project problems coupled with the limited time available for preparation means that choices will have to be made to assure viability of the most critical analytical processes.

As soon as you saw the word "dimensionality" you probably knew we were in trouble, right? But this sentence drags itself back and forth across the page, turning back on itself a couple of times, until it's so twisted and we're so confused that nothing makes sense.

What is it trying to say? This is only a guess, but I think it means:

This project is tackling a number of big problems. Unfortunately, time is short. As a result, you need to decide which problems are the most important to keeping your business running.

You can see how breaking it into three shorter, simpler sentences and using simpler words made it more readable.