Persuasive Business Proposals: Writing to Win More Customers, Clients, and Contracts

Avoid Complicated Sentences

Have you ever found yourself reading something complicated, straining to understand, when your brain suddenly goes “blue screen”? You go back to the beginning of the passage and start over again. You reread the material, not because it was so enjoyable going through it the first time, but because you just couldn’t fuse it into anything that made sense. Usually when that happens, you have run up against a poorly constructed, overly complicated sentence, and your brain simply couldn’t decode it. The sentence was too complex to make sense.

Sentence complexity is a function of two elements: length and syntactic structure. Length is simply a matter of how many words your sentences contain. Keep them short. Strive for an ...