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Long vs. Short Sentences 2869 Views
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Description:
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Transcript
- 00:04
Long v. Short Sentences, a la Shmoop. Some sentences in life need to be… short.
- 00:11
Some need to be long. And some sentences…could stand to be even
- 00:14
a little bit shorter.
- 00:16
Wrap it up, buddy.
- 00:18
We get it. It’s hard to know when to put a period on a huge, complicated concept.
Full Transcript
- 00:23
Long sentences are useful – they flow uninterrupted; they can be beautiful and flowery and eloquent
- 00:28
and all-encompassing…
- 00:29
…but man, you gotta give your reader a chance to breathe once in a while.
- 00:34
Put a mercy period in there before their brains implode. Or they ditch your paper to go watch
- 00:38
Adventure Time.
- 00:42
Chopping up the occasional sentence into bite-sized pieces will actually make your writing flow
- 00:46
better, not worse.
- 00:48
A paper filled with long, languid sentences is like a bowl of overcooked noodles – bland,
- 00:53
texture-less and hard to get through.
- 00:54
Throw in some shorter sentences, and we’ve got the base -- our pasta – but now it’s
- 00:59
got texture – little bits of onion, tomato, parmesan cheese, ooh, maybe some fresh basil…
- 01:03
Mmm. now that’s a good dinner. Er… paper.
- 01:08
If we’ve shoved a comma between two phrases, or semicolon, or a dash – we should think
- 01:12
about cutting it out. Not always, but sometimes.
- 01:15
This is especially handy for keeping up strong arguments throughout our paper. Let’s not
- 01:19
turn our arguments into long, wet noodles. They need to pop.
- 01:22
If we use fewer words, we sound more assertive, powerful, and, well, like we’re actually
- 01:28
making some sense. Like, say: “Earth revolves around the sun.”
- 01:33
5 words – and there’s an argument nobody can deny.
- 01:36
Sorry, Galileo.
- 01:38
Now, same thing applies if we’re doing nothing but the toppings. Our sentences are always
- 01:43
short. We never change it up. We never make it longer. We sort of. Sound. Like. A. Robot.
- 01:49
We need long sentences. We need the noodles. They make our work flow; they make the fine
- 01:54
points of our paper sound interconnected. Really, they bring everything together.
- 01:58
So if we’re the kind of person that’s always short, try to marry some of our phrases
- 02:03
together – with a semi-colon, a comma, or a linking word like “and,” “but,”
- 02:08
or “although.” Anyway, we probably know how to squish our
- 02:12
sentences together or pull them apart…
- 02:13
…but we might have not thought about the power of the short sentence versus the long.
- 02:18
One makes us strong and assertive – the other flowing and graceful. We need both to
- 02:22
write a paper that anyone can get through, let alone love.
- 02:25
Because believe it or not, even astrophysics can make sense.
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