Shorter sentences are better for communicating information in a way that’s easy to absorb.
Longer sentences can help establish tone and mood in certain ways. But if you’re accustomed to shorter sentences they can be offputting.
As a teen some of my favorite books were classics that tended to half-page-long sentences. As an adult I have no patience to parse and understand something like that. All my mental energy has been spent on work and “adulting”. If I’m going to read literature, it’s going to be something effortlessly legible —- even if that means it’s fluff. And if an article that I don’t have to read makes me spend my energy on parsing the sentences instead of considering the concepts conveyed, screw that, the browser has a back button.
Shorter sentences are better for communicating information in a way that’s easy to absorb.
Longer sentences can help establish tone and mood in certain ways. But if you’re accustomed to shorter sentences they can be offputting.
As a teen some of my favorite books were classics that tended to half-page-long sentences. As an adult I have no patience to parse and understand something like that. All my mental energy has been spent on work and “adulting”. If I’m going to read literature, it’s going to be something effortlessly legible —- even if that means it’s fluff. And if an article that I don’t have to read makes me spend my energy on parsing the sentences instead of considering the concepts conveyed, screw that, the browser has a back button.
Interesting that reduced sentence lengths appears to greatly predate recent declines in reading comprehension.
'The reason the average reader could have been smarter in the past is because literacy used to be more limited.'