By Nirmaldasan
Plain English recommends short sentences. Robert Gunning faults marathon sentences in his book How To Take The Fog Out Of Writing. Though he admits to the possibility of long sentences being balanced and readable, he notes that only highly skilled writers such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Wolfe can write a marathon sentence with clarity. He adds: “But even these accomplished writers produced marathon sentences only occasionally. On the average, they wrote fewer than 20 words per sentence.”
Jyoti Sanyal’s Indlish has an interesting and informative chapter titled ‘Shrink or sink’ on the length of the sentence. He writes: “Based on several studies, press associations in the USA have laid down a readability table. Their survey shows readers find sentences of 8 words or less very easy to read; 11 words, easy; 14 words fairly easy; 17 words standard; 21 words fairly difficult; 25 words difficult and 29 words or more, very difficult.”
Martin Cutts, in his Oxford Guide To Plain English, offers the following guideline: “Over the whole document, make the average sentence length 15-20 words.” And what’s the reason? He explains: “More people fear snakes than full stops, so they recoil when a long sentence comes hissing across the page.”
Plain English also recommends short words. Even if the average sentence length of a document is 15-20 words, readability is not guaranteed. Polysyllabic words are likely to make the meaning of the document difficult to grasp. So we also need a guideline for average word length.
Words have two units of measure: syllables and letters. I examined the word list of Voice Of America and found that the average word length in syllables is 1.74 and that in letters is 5.67.
Now, we have been measuring sentences only in words. But sentences have three units of measure: words, syllables and characters. And so we may take the following as the new guideline: “Over the whole document, make the average sentence length 15-20 words, 25-33 syllables and 75-100 characters.”
October 30, 2009 at 9:37 pm |
[…] A post on the Readability Monitor blog takes into account words, syllables and even characters when framing ab ideal range for a readable sentence: Sentences have three units of measure: words, syllables and characters. And so we may take the following as the new guideline: “Over the whole document, make the average sentence length 15-20 words, 25-33 syllables and 75-100 characters.” […]
June 3, 2011 at 7:22 am |
[…] writers to keep sentences short. The optimum sentence length is roughly between 15 and 25 words, depending on whom you ask. FLM’s limit is 35 words because the average sentence length is a rough measurement, generally […]
August 3, 2011 at 8:11 pm |
[…] this blog will be book and movie reviews in 14 words or less. Why 14? Well, according to here and here, the average English sentence is 14 words and 14 word sentences are “fairly easy” to […]
November 17, 2012 at 5:55 am |
[…] have to, I didn't want to. This got me thinking. What makes a good, if not great, first sentence? How long should it be? What should it reveal? I remember being taught that the first sentence is all important. So I […]
February 20, 2013 at 4:33 am |
Thanks a heap for your research, Nirmaldasan. I recently finished a word counting tool that uses some of your info :)
You can check it out at http://www.countwordsworth.com, if you like.
February 21, 2013 at 9:15 am |
Thanks. It would be nice if you could also include the strain index in your tool.
February 23, 2013 at 3:29 am
Oh, I wasn’t aware of this. Can you send me to some reading material?
February 25, 2013 at 6:54 am
The General Form of Strain Index:
https://strainindex.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/the-general-form-of-strain-index/
You will also find other articles about my strain index in this blog: https://strainindex.wordpress.com
April 16, 2013 at 7:44 am
Ah, syllables – I’m working on that one… turns out it’s a little harder than you’d think to teach a computer that sort of stuff. I’ll be working on that side of things over the next few weeks though, so we might just have a measurement tool for this strain index of yours :)
June 18, 2013 at 12:53 pm |
[…] a blog about writing, Strainindex Nirmaldasan quotes the Oxford Guide to Plain English identifying that on average now, sentence […]
September 27, 2013 at 1:34 pm |
[…] The Average Sentence Length, July 2008 […]
January 27, 2014 at 12:23 am |
[…] in a sentence. One sentence. That’s 15 to 20 words on average, according to “Readability Monitor,” a blog “keeping track of readable language.” Boiling yourself down to 25 to 33 […]
July 18, 2014 at 11:04 pm |
Reblogged this on thestorycoach.net and commented:
Worth considering.
September 18, 2014 at 4:07 am |
[…] checked your word lengths for the paragraph: 28, 30, 28, 45, 41, 29, 43—average 35. This is a great article on word lengths. Try to keep your sentences in the 10-20 range. Then you can throw in a couple longer and a couple […]