How to Write Good Sentences — And Why You Should
Two Golden Rules and Five Techniques

Kethyr's CAMEL Report
Mountain View, California
Monday, June 1, 2009

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If you want to be your best in business, you must be a good writer. By good, I don't mean crafty or artful, but clear and persuasive. For our purposes, writing is a means to an end. The end is (1) the clear expression of an important idea or (2) persuasion. To do either well, you don't need to have the literary sensitivity of a Cormac McCarthy, but you do need to do certain things, some of which I'll talk about today.

Some of the following suggestions come from Bruce Ross-Larson, founder of the American Writing Institute and author of Edit Yourself, a book a highly recommended.

Writing Good Sentences — The Two Biggest Secrets

Before you can write a persuasive e-mail or effective website copy, you must be capable of writing a good sentence. The first Golden Rule of sentence writing is to express one, and only one, idea in each sentence. (Ross-Larson allows for "two closely related ideas" in one sentence.)

The second Golden Rule of sentence writing — and this one's from me — is to make sure the idea you are expressing is a good one.

The mistakes made by not following these two rules are extremely common. They are responsible — I'll bet — for 60% to 80% of bad writing. Not only are they proliferate, they are deadly. Break either of the Golden Rules of Sentence Writing and you are in trouble. Break both at once and you will make your reader wonder how smart you really are.

Ross-Larson Identifies 5 Types of Sentences:

1. Direct
    
   The simplest and thus the clearest, the direct sentence has one main clause and is the starting point for countless variants.
    
   Example: Smart restaurateurs are putting persimmons on the menu.
    
2. Embellished
    
   The first common variant to the direct sentence is to attach a phrase — at the beginning, middle, or end.
    
   Example: By all means, Arkansas has become more like the rest of America.
    
3. Complicated
    
   The second common variant to the direct sentence is to add a comment or definition by means of a "which" clause.
    
   Example: The book also suffers more than usual from Elshtain's prose style, which is earnest at best and plodding at worst.
    
4. Conditioned
    
   You can condition the main clause with another clause beginning with "when", "if", "because", "since", "as" and so on.
    
   Example: When Barack Obama toasts Hu Jintao at the White House next week, there will be no shortage of critics to accuse him of supping with the devil.
    
5. Multiplied
    
   Another variant is to combine the above structures and multiply their parts.
    
   Example: The number of men who consider working women to be worse mothers has dropped precipitously since 1970, but the number of women who think so has dropped far less sharply.

Five Techniques to Improve Your Sentences:

1. Make your sentences short. Ross-Larson recommends that sentences not exceed 22 words (about two lines of print).
    
2. Vary length. Every third or fourth sentence should be short. It is acceptable nowadays to shorten sentences by using sentence fragments — partial sentences.
    
   Example: All the crusading doesn't reassure the public. Just the opposite.
    
   Occasionally, it's good to use extra-short and/or fragments to begin or end paragraphs. And you can string two or three short sentences together to create cadence.
    
   Example: Literature is invention. Fiction is faction. To carry a story line a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
    
3. To give your sentences a quick stop-and-go, use the interruptive dash.
    
   Example: New York is a city ripe with extremes — of wealth and poverty, of creative energy and rage.
    
4. Employ the imperative to grab attention.
    
   Example: Trek to the tops of mountains, the sources of rivers, and the earth's icebound poles.
    
5. Address your readers directly to make your message personal and compelling.
    
   Example: As a parent, you want to do everything possible to keep your children from experimenting with drugs.

Make These Techniques Work For You

Keep these rules and techniques in your head (or jot them down on a note card) and edit your next e-mail or Web page accordingly. You'll see an immediate improvement. Your writing will have more energy and power.

Practice this for a week or two and you will lock in some new, powerful writing habits. And you'll begin to see the results in people's responses to what you've written!

Yours in success,

Sean Eric Armstrong
Kethyr's CAMEL Report

P.S. Please send your questions and comments to editor@kethyr.com.

Looking for help with your professional communications? For information on our editing, writing, and consultation services, contact Kethyr Solutions at info@kethyrsolutions.com or 888-538-4971 and learn how we can help you today!

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