How to write an
effective sentence
By Adam Frick · Illustrated draftWhat did the committee decide?
The committee had two lengthy meetings. Fine, but did the committee approve the proposal? When the meeting history interrupts the subject and verb, the sentence makes you wait for the decision. I prefer to give you the decision first and explain the timing afterwards. The first comparison below keeps the same information while changing the order in which you meet that information.
See the supporting references.Find the decision before the meeting history.
Keep the sentence core visible.
Constructed teaching exampleThe committee, after two lengthy meetings, approved the proposal.
The committee approved the proposal after two lengthy meetings.
Put the action in the verb.
Constructed teaching exampleThe team conducted an analysis of the samples.
The team analysed the samples.
Choose the emphasis deliberately.
Constructed teaching exampleThe researchers measured the temperature every hour.
The temperature was measured every hour.
Let the content do the impressive work.
A difficult idea may need a careful qualification, but impressive-looking wording does not establish a strong argument. Research on status and jargon identifies concern about audience judgement as one reason for elaborate wording. Research on legal writing also points towards inherited drafting habits, so the explanation cannot be reduced to insecurity.
The studies below examine vocabulary, syntax and particular reading tasks. Those findings give us reasons to question unnecessary complexity without treating every long sentence as ineffective. Keep the detail your reader needs and remove the extra work that the wording creates.
A short sentence can still do a poor job.
I would keep a longer sentence when the extra detail prevents a misleading claim. In the passive example, putting the measurement first may also suit a methods section better than naming the researchers again. My suggested average of about 20–25 words is a prompt to inspect crowded writing, not a research threshold or a target for every sentence. Ask what your reader needs to understand before reaching for the scissors.
References and evidence
- 2022 speaker figures reported by LemonGrad ↩
- The Science of Scientific Writing ↩
- Edward Gibson’s 1998 account of syntactic locality ↩
- 2020 study of status and jargon ↩
- Oppenheimer’s 2006 experiments ↩
- Martínez, Mollica and Gibson’s 2022 study ↩
- the same researchers’ 2024 study ↩
- the researchers’ 2023 experiments with lawyers ↩
Read the evidence and its limits.
Effective writing depends on grammar, precise wording, rhythm and the order of information. The useful question is what happens when another person reads the words you have put on the page. The 2022 speaker figures reported by LemonGrad[1] imply that about 74.3% of English speakers are non-native. I want sentence structure to help that shared audience follow the meaning.
A reader who meets a subject expects an action or a description concerning that subject. The work of George Gopen and Judith Swan discusses this expectation in The Science of Scientific Writing[2] (1990), including the difficulty caused by lengthy separation of subjects and verbs. Give the reader that information reasonably soon.
A short sentence core also has a psycholinguistic explanation. Edward Gibson’s 1998 account of syntactic locality[3] proposes that maintaining an unfinished grammatical dependency creates a memory cost. Distance can also increase the work required to connect related words. The account supports checking unnecessary subject–verb separation without making sentence length alone a measure of difficulty.
A writer may make the language more elaborate in response to concern about how an audience will judge the writer. The researchers examined this mechanism in their 2020 study of status and jargon[4], which combined nine studies with archival analysis of about 64,000 dissertation titles. The experimental findings linked lower status with increased jargon through concern about audience evaluation. That mechanism supports my concern that a writer’s wish to gain acceptance can displace attention from the meaning the reader needs.
Unnecessary elaboration can also undermine the impression the writer wants to create. In Oppenheimer’s 2006 experiments[5], greater unnecessary vocabulary complexity reduced readers’ judgements of the author’s intelligence. The study examines vocabulary and processing fluency, so the finding must not be extended automatically to every complex grammatical structure. In relation to writing practice, the result gives a writer a reason to question words chosen mainly to display sophistication.
Research on legal prose provides a direct test of structure as well as vocabulary. Martínez, Mollica and Gibson’s 2022 study[6] combined corpus analysis with two experiments involving 184 participants. Readers recalled and understood legal excerpts less well when the excerpts retained difficult linguistic features rather than simpler wording. Clauses embedded within other clauses were particularly damaging to recall. The finding gives my objection to needless grammatical elaboration a basis in measured reader performance within that legal context.
Complexity can also become a signal of authority before the writer has considered the reader’s needs. In the same researchers’ 2024 study[7], 286 participants across two preregistered experiments produced more embedded syntax when writing official laws than when writing comparison texts. The second experiment compared laws with unofficial descriptions of equivalent conceptual complexity. The authors interpreted the results as support for the “magic spell” hypothesis, in which unusual language helps a text signal legal authority. That interpretation concerns the legal register, but the experiment shows why complicated syntax cannot automatically be defended as a necessary consequence of complicated content.
An honest account must also consider evidence against treating peer approval as the explanation for every elaborate sentence. In the researchers’ 2023 experiments with lawyers[8], lawyers understood and recalled simpler contracts more successfully and rated the simpler versions as better writing. The lawyers also judged the simpler versions no less enforceable. Those findings weakened an explanation based on professional insiders preferring legalese and were more consistent with convenience and inherited drafting practices. My argument gains precision from that distinction: fear of judgement is one supported mechanism, while habit and convention can preserve difficult prose without a conscious wish to impress.