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Keep your sentences under control

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Edited by Peter Whyte, Wednesday, 8 Dec 2010, 00:08

William Zinsser has some wise advice on writing sentences that apply well to discursive TMA answers.

There's not much to be said about the period1 except that most writers don't reach it soon enough. If you find yourself hopelessly mired in a long sentence, it's probably because you're trying to make the sentence do more than it can reasonably do -- perhaps express two dissimilar thoughts. The quickest way out is to break the long sentence into two short sentences, or even three. There is no minimum length for a sentence that's acceptable in the eyes of God. Among good writers it is the short sentence that predominates, and don't tell me about Norman Mailer -- he's a genius. If you want to write long sentences, be a genius. Or at least make sure that the sentence is under control from beginning to end in syntax and punctuation, so that the reader knows where he is at every step of the winding trail.2

__________

1 full stop.

2 On Writing Well. 5/ed, New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1995, pp. 114-115.

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