Best sentence length in academic writing

Sentence length may seem an unimportant attribute of your academic paper, however, correct use of your sentences’ length and a rhyme of your writing can significantly enhance the reader experience. The best way to make your writing pleasant is to mix in a reasonable form the short, simple sentences together with longer, complex sentences.

Choosing the best sentence length

The length of the sentence you would pick depends on the purpose of the sentence. But the main point to remember is that you should not think about each and every sentence, but rather only apply your sentence length analysis when you feel a problem in your writing. If you get to using only long or only short sentences, consider changing the tone to mix them. Reading different sentence length texts is much more pleasant than reading monotonous sentences.

Short sentence length

When sentences are short, reading feels like chopping:

Sally woke up. She washed her face and went outside to the grandma. “G’d morning.” “Hi.” “Any news from Gordon?” “No.” Sally got sad. She went to her bedroom. Days went by.

Long sentence length

Long sentences are vague and difficult to catch up:

As sally woke up, hearing the songs of the early birds ourside, the first idea that came to her mind was her beloved brother Gordon, who went to a fairy up town last wednesday, and never returned. Thinking only of him, Sally reluctantly washed herself, and, horrified from the person in the mirror, went outside to find her statue-silent grandmother with an expression of disturbance on her face, arms, legs, and every other part of her body. After a short conversation, Sally found out from the grandma that the brother still had not been heard from, and her grief had grown from immense to eternal; she should have gone with the rest of the family, but instead, they left her to keep an eye on the grandma while everyone else is hurtling across the live town seeking Gordon.

Mixed sentence length: best

Gordon missing for 4 days. His twin sister Sally and Grandma Penelope stayed at home to wait for some news from Gordon, the rest of the family went to look for him in the town. Although everybody realized that Gordon — a huge towering young man — is all right, not knowing anything about him made everyone feel uncomfortable enough to start the search. Sally wanted to join, but was left to look for granny. As days went by, Sally got more and more sad and discouraged, because she loved her brother very much.

As you see in the examples above, it is better to stick to the third tone of writing, using mixed sentence length. Mix long and short sentences, so that the reader can keep up with the idea and enjoy the rhymes of your writing at the same time.

The story was made up at the moment of writing this post.