The Writing is Thinking approach starts with short sentences. Experimenting with short sentences is the first lesson in Verlyn Klinkenborg’s brilliant writing book Several Short Sentences about Writing.
Klinkenborg writes:
There’s nothing wrong with well-made, strongly constructed, purposeful long sentences.
several short sentences about writing, pg 9-10
But long sentences often tend to collapse or break down or become opaque or trip over their awkwardness.
They’re pasted together with false syntax
And rely on words like “with” and “as” to lengthen the sentence.
They’re short on verbs, weak in syntactic vigor,
Full of floating, unattached phrases often out of position.
And worse—the end of the sentence commonly forgets its beginning,
As if the sentence were a long, weary road to the wrong place.
Klikenborg is not addressing academic writers in particular. But this passage can be illustrated beautifully with academic writing.
Here are a few examples of typical academic sentences (each links to its own before/after makeover post):
- My measure of occupation-specific skills builds on the task-specific skill framework to incorporate the transfer of skills across occupations based on a measure of occupational similarity in job tasks (see the methodological appendix for the creation of this measure).
- The interpretation according to which enlightenment/wisdom and virtue/goodness and meditation/mindfulness are the ultimate end is thought by many contemporary (but not all) Buddhists to state the ultimate end claim in a plausible and accessible manner.
- The comestible sensations that precede both the achieved reminiscence and its inherent condition of emotional repose are a sensorimotor dramatization of the fact that a “feeling of tendency” is being conveyed to his memory by his taste buds.
- The decision not to investigate the appearance of arrogance but instead to take it at face value—to deny, to put it another way, the possibility of a distinction in a given case between arrogation and arrogance—in effect constitutes a rejection of philosophical conversation.
The first sentence was written by one of my writing clients (and thus caught and ousted before publication). The last three sentences I plucked while flipping through several books on my shelf (published by Columbia, MIT Press, and Bloomsbury Academic). The authors of two of these sentences are scholars whose ideas have influenced me enormously and are writers I admire. In other words, long complex sentences are everywhere in academic writing.
But being everywhere does not translate to being good or accessible writing, as even the novice philosopher will remind you. In the next few posts, I’ll give each of these sentences a Writing is Thinking makeover. I’ll experiment with translating them into multiple, short sentences, and see which versions we prefer.