As we do on the first Thursday of every month, we look to my book, Eating an Elephant: Write Your Life One Bite at a Time, for tips on improving our writing.
In this episode of the Life Writers Vlog, we focus on how sentence length shapes rhythm and pacing in our stories. We often think in words, but how we group those words into short, medium, or long sentences matters more than we realize.
I share helpful guidance on the importance of sentence length from Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer and 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing by Gary Provost. Here’s a link to episode #40 that focuses on Provost’s book.
You don’t need to count every word, but you should check your sentence lengths visually. Temporarily, you can add line breaks between sentences so you can see the mix of sentence lengths.
Tell me, do you consider sentence length when editing? Do you have an editing process that includes sentence-length checks? Do you know of software or an app that graphs or details sentence length?
Share your thoughts on sentence length in the comments section below.
But regardless of what sentence lengths you use, always remember, the only way to do this wrong is to not do it at all!
The colored pencil picture makes the teaching of sentence lengths memorable. I like the idea of line breaks. Thank you
very nice examples! Thank you again and again and again. The red looks good on your video too. I found this free online tool for analyzing sentence length and structure, useful. https://gorby.app/tools/average-sentence-length-calculator/ Hope others play with it and let us know what they think.
I don’t count words and I don’t pay much attention to the length of the sentence. I rather read the sentence aloud and find a pleasant cadence and flow. If I find myself stumbling and hobbling while reading, I adjust the word choice or length of sentence to make it flow more easily. I will chop a sentence for stress or special effect.
I too don’t pay much attention to sentence length, but I will now! It reminded me of the musical quality to poetry, which appeals to me.
By varying the length of my sentences, I hope to get more readers or at least more attention from the readers I do have.
I have to go. I need to check my sentence length on my story!
Very interesting, thank you Patricia for another wonderful tidbit of information. Never considered how varying sentence lengths as being important but loved the musical element that one can achieve through their writing, that I get and it is a missing element I can relate to in improving my writing skills. Am loving the Artist’s Way. Each morning after writing in my “anxiety anger dumps” journal, as many of us are calling it, I am led to my piano to let my fingers play its own melodies. Feel free and ever so comforting.
I conciously vary sentence length unless I want to achieve a certain effect, for example, short sentences to speed up the action, and long sentences to slow it down. Sentence length is part of my editing process, although I cheat. I use MyWordCount, which gives me a graph of sentence lengths in my piece. Unfortunately, the program is no longer available to new users. I just started using the phrase checker in that program to search for three-word phrases, to see where I might be repeating them. And I am checking nouns. I found a free program that identifies nouns… Read more »
I do write different length sentences but more by accident than on purpose. After hearing your podcast, I will definitely pay more attention to sentence length. Thanks for the video. Ray Deckert.