ShmoopTube

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Long v. Short Sentences, a la Shmoop. Some sentences in life need to be… short.

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Some need to be long. And some sentences…could stand to be even

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a little bit shorter.

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Wrap it up, buddy.

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We get it. It’s hard to know when to put a period on a huge, complicated concept.

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Long sentences are useful – they flow uninterrupted; they can be beautiful and flowery and eloquent

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and all-encompassing…

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…but man, you gotta give your reader a chance to breathe once in a while.

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Put a mercy period in there before their brains implode. Or they ditch your paper to go watch

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Adventure Time.

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Chopping up the occasional sentence into bite-sized pieces will actually make your writing flow

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better, not worse.

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A paper filled with long, languid sentences is like a bowl of overcooked noodles – bland,

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texture-less and hard to get through.

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Throw in some shorter sentences, and we’ve got the base -- our pasta – but now it’s

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got texture – little bits of onion, tomato, parmesan cheese, ooh, maybe some fresh basil…

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Mmm. now that’s a good dinner. Er… paper.

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If we’ve shoved a comma between two phrases, or semicolon, or a dash – we should think

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about cutting it out. Not always, but sometimes.

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This is especially handy for keeping up strong arguments throughout our paper. Let’s not

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turn our arguments into long, wet noodles. They need to pop.

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If we use fewer words, we sound more assertive, powerful, and, well, like we’re actually

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making some sense. Like, say: “Earth revolves around the sun.”

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5 words – and there’s an argument nobody can deny.

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Sorry, Galileo.

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Now, same thing applies if we’re doing nothing but the toppings. Our sentences are always

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short. We never change it up. We never make it longer. We sort of. Sound. Like. A. Robot.

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We need long sentences. We need the noodles. They make our work flow; they make the fine

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points of our paper sound interconnected. Really, they bring everything together.

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So if we’re the kind of person that’s always short, try to marry some of our phrases

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together – with a semi-colon, a comma, or a linking word like “and,” “but,”

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or “although.” Anyway, we probably know how to squish our

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sentences together or pull them apart…

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…but we might have not thought about the power of the short sentence versus the long.

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One makes us strong and assertive – the other flowing and graceful. We need both to

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write a paper that anyone can get through, let alone love.

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Because believe it or not, even astrophysics can make sense.

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