If punctuation is the percussion of your prose, then sentences sing the melody. Like songs, they carry the meaning while landing on the reader’s inner ear in subtle ways.

Sentences are also scaffolds for meaning. Bloated sentence structures can bury profound insights. As writers, we have to balance both functions: meaning and sound.

While we could talk all day about sentence structures, let’s start with the easiest variable to control: length.

Too many long sentences strung together might bury the internal rhythm of your writing or strain the reader’s brain. Pages of short ones might make the writing seem dull.

This month, let’s experiment with sentence length and its effect on the writing voice.

First, a warm-up

Look at a passage by a favorite author and decide whether you’d categorize each sentence as long or short, where a “short” sentence meets the following qualifications:

• You can read the whole thing easily in one breath.
• It has no em-dashes, parenthetical phrases, colons or semicolons.
• It doesn’t include many commas or dependent clauses.

Mostly, you can just eyeball it. Does it look long or short? Does it “sound” long or short to your inner ear? (If it feels “medium,” then compare it to the sentence surrounding it.)

For example, here’s the sentence pattern for the start of a newsletter by the fantastic writer George Saunders:

Long Long Short Long Long Short Long Long Long

Take something that you’ve written and do the same analysis. What do you see?

You may notice that much of your writing uses similar kinds of patterns. We fall into writing habits we may not even notice.

The Exercise

Choose a simple sentence rhythm pattern that deviates from your normal. For most people, I suggest Long-Long-Short.

If your writing already meets this pattern, take on more of a challenge. You could experiment with Long-Short-Long-Short (a limping march through the prose.) Or, dial up your long sentence quotient with a Long-Long-Long-Short pattern.

Find a passage you’ve written and revise it into the pattern. As you figure out how to rearrange the sentences, pay attention to meaning as well as sound.

• String shorter sentences into longer ones by looking for connections between the ideas.
• Isolate your most powerful ideas in short sentences.

How does this work affect your writing voice?

Of course, you’re never going to choose to write only in rigid sentence patterns. But this experiment can help you see where you might benefit from loosening your habits. You may discover that you like the impact of sprinkling shorter sentences in the long ones, or the flow that comes from longer sentences. The choice is yours.

Related Content

This is the second exercise I’ve shared from the Sentence section of The Writer’s Voice. The first, and a favorite, is the One Sentence Per Line exercise. If you haven’t tried that yet, give it a go.

Watch the video about this exercise on YouTube.