Direct and Clear
However, Alexander Bain (English Composition and Rhetoric, 1887) is one of the first writers to underline the need of using both short and long sentences in rhetorical composition "Simplistic, direct communication is facilitated by using short sentences! Many modern critics believe that varied sentence length is crucial to good style, but they also advise writers to reduce the length of all their sentences to the bare minimum. Wordiness has become a common criticism of modern writers, particularly student writers, despite the fact that critics often substitute more colorful pet terms for it. Claire Kehrwald Cook (1985) refers to "baggy" sentences when she discusses editing. In unrevised words, Richard Lanham (1979) estimates a "lard factor" of 33 to 50 percent. Joseph Williams (1981), a language historian and stylist, encourages writers to regulate the "sprawl" of their sentences. Jacques Barzun (1975), though he is not a Saxonist, tries to decrease surplusage in syntax and diction in his novel, Simple and Direct: "In order for communication to be full, it must begin with the fewest words and even syllables!'
The idea that shorter sentences are easier to read has been formalized as a law in some studies. From the Elizabethan era to the late nineteenth century, literary prose had a decrease in sentence length, according to L. A. Sherman (1893). This decrease in sentence length can be attributed to changes in punctuation practice, but Rudolf Flesch (1949) uses Sherman's data to chart a more drastic decline from an Elizabethan average of 45 words per sentence to a Victorian average of 29, a turn-of-the-century figure averaging 20 sentences, and an even more recent tally between 13 and 17 sentences. When calculating readability, Flesch also takes word length into account, favoring the native word whenever possible. On Flesch's standard readability scale, for a 20-word phrase to be considered standard, it must contain an average 1.4 syllables per word. Flesch recommends that all writers aim towards the sentence and word constraints of newspaper pieces, omitting any consideration of genre.
The Art of Clarity and Grace: Ten Lessons for Writers, As a University of Chicago professor, Joseph Williams (1981) is more aware of the contextual constraints of writing: newspapers have short sentences, magazines have 20-22 word averages, and scholarly prose runs much longer. Despite his suggestion that sentences longer than 2.5 lines be re-examined, Williams does not impose any restrictions on the length of sentences. According to John Lannon's Technical Writing (1985), the average length of a sentence in technical publications should not exceed twenty-five words. An acceptable range of 16.7 to 25.3 words per sentence was determined by the Bell Laboratories style programs in the Writer's Workbench (1983), which flagged for possible modification sentences that were too short as well as those that were long. There should be a range between 29.2% and 38.0% short sentences in a text, while the mix of long sentences should be between 11.77% and 18.99%. According to WWB, the current chapter has an average sentence length of 29 words, which is slightly longer than the suggested length for technical memoranda according to the program.
