Reach the period sooner
The story goes that when future columnist James J. Kilpatrick was a young newspaper reporter, he wrote lots of deadly long sentences. Finally, in frustration, the city editor gave Kilpatrick a piece of paper covered with dots.
“These interesting objects, which apparently you have never encountered before, are known as periods,” the editor said. “You would do well to use them.”
Image by David J
We’d all do well to use more periods. As William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, writes:
“There’s not much to be said about the period, except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.”
Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer agrees. He writes:
“No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place.”
So how can you get to the period faster?
Scan for punctuation.
“(Martin) Amis has loosened his belt, and his slangy, scattershot prose veers toward self-parody. Sentences are either impossibly short or impossibly long. Commas, colons, parentheses and dashes crawl all over the page like flesh-eating microbes.”
— Jeff Giles, senior editor of Newsweek’s Arts & Entertainment section
Are your sentences too long? If so, scan your copy for punctuation marks other than periods. Those include:
- Colons
- Commas
- Dashes
- Ellipses
- Parentheses
- Semicolons
These connect dependent and independent clauses together to create sprawling sentences. They also earn the disdain of professional writers.
Commas
Florence King, author of Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, writes:
“I like to use as few commas as possible so that sentences will go down in one swallow without touching the sides.”
And English lexicographer H.W. Fowler warns:
“Anyone who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable and question whether it is necessary.”
Dashes
Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at The Poynter Institute and author of Writing Tools, describes the dash thus:
“It’s the Kato Kaelin of punctuation marks. Always there. Lying around. So generic. So available.”
Semicolons
Writers reserve special disdain, though, for the semicolon. It has the dreadful superpower of connecting independent clauses — full sentences — into a single sentence.
Kurt Vonnegut, author of such novels as Slaughterhouse-Five, wrote:
“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
Vonnegut also wrote:
“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life. Old age is more like a semicolon.”
The Poynter Institute’s Clark writes of the semicolon:
“I hate the way it looks. Like a colon that’s had a polyp removed.”
Viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella, who crunched the numbers on 1 million retweets to learn what makes information go viral, calls the semicolon:
“The only unretweetable punctuation mark.”
And James J. Kilpatrick, journalist and author of The Writer’s Art, writes:
“My thought for the day is that the semicolon rarely helps a passage; usually it creates little more than clutter. This is my second thought for the day: The semicolon rarely helps a passage. Usually it creates little more than clutter.”
Periods
When you find commas, dashes, semicolons and other punctuation marks, see whether you can substitute a period instead. As Kilpatrick writes:
“The period, believe me, is the best friend a writer will ever have.”
You would do well to use them.
How long should your message be?
Would your message be twice as good if it were half as long?
Yes, the research says. The shorter your message, the more likely readers are to read it, understand it and make good decisions based on it.
So how long is too long? What’s the right length for your piece? Your paragraphs? Your sentences? Your words?Find out at Rev Up Readability — our tight-writing workshop, which starts Feb. 22.
There, you’ll use a cool (free!) tool to analyze your message for 33 readability metrics. You’ll leave with quantifiable targets, tips and techniques for measurably boosting readability.
Save up to $100 with our group discounts.
I’m pleading for long sentences. Sure, web writing should be short. Give information fast. Don’t waste time clearing your throat. I get it. People are looking for something on your website. If they can’t find it, they’ll go elsewhere.
Long sentences, though, aren’t just bastards of the 19th century. DF Wallace, as one of many examples in modern literature, wrote tremendously lengthy and complex sentences that challenge readers to try harder. The notion of making everything simple is marketing malarkey. You’re actually stripping away value when your whittle your vocabulary until Flesch–Kincaid says it’s OK for fifth graders.
On another point, every typographic mark has its correct usage. Dashes and parentheses are the “disdain of professional writers”? Define: pretentious. Those aren’t writers I want to read. Where is this pro article’s mention of the all-too-common overuse of the exclamation point? That’s more problematic than a well-placed dash. And saying a semicolon is inherently bad is like complaining about Comic Sans. In the right context, there is a place for a semicolon. Snarky Vonnegut knew this. Just because most usage is bad doesn’t mean a mark has lost its purpose.
Perhaps a better consideration of ease and readability is typographic measure, the length of a line of text. Help reduce eye strain: Trim your margins so there are fewer characters per line (including spaces), ideally between 40 and 80. Two-and-a-half alphabets (65 characters) is a good starting point.
Of course, you are right, Kenneth: No punctuation mark — even the semicolon! even the exclamation point! — is inherently bad.
I, too, love a long, curly sentence, though I think they’re most effective in passages with mostly short sentences. (And I’m not sure “challenge readers to try harder” is our goal in corporate comms.)
That said, I found your response not only witty and well reasoned, but also delightfully tight. One reason: Your sentences weigh in at 9.8 words on average, your words at about 5 characters each. Your Flesch Reading Ease is 56 points; your Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 7.8.
That’s writing I can wrap my mind around.