The Web Content Style Guide: An Essential Reference for Online Writers, Editors, and Managers

Keep Your Sentences Simple

One of the best ways to make your writing Web friendly is to keep your sentences short and simple. Long, convoluted sentences, which may read very nicely in print (such as this one), will often seem forbidding on screen. They can distract your readers from their primary goal of finding information.

There are essentially three kinds of sentences, the first of which is the simple sentence. The simple sentence contains a verb, and usually a subject. It may or may not have an object. The famous first line of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, for instance, is: “Call me Ishmael.” Another notable simple-sentence first line introduces Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. It reads: “Nobody could sleep.”

Second is the compound ...