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Long vs. Short Sentences 2855 Views


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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.

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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