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Web Content Style Guide - Part 7
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 onscreen. 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 sentence, which is basically two simple sentences that are related. An example would be: "The Nasdaq crashed, and investors were devastated."
Finally comes the complex sentence, which includes a dependent clause. To embellish the last example, an example of a complex sentence would be: "The Nasdaq crashed, and investors were devastated because they didn't see it coming." ("Because they didn't see it coming" is the dependant clause.) From there, you can weave compound and complex sentences together until you have a very tangled web indeed. Some novelists—Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, and Proust, for instance—are famous for writing sentences that go on for pages.
But the intent of most online writing is neither to dazzle the reader with literary technique nor to see how much you can cram into a single sentence; the intent is to communicate as quickly and efficiently as possible. This holds especially true for news and business writing.
Consider the following sentence, from a New York Times News Service dispatch posted on the International Herald Tribune site:
- The situation here, already tense, turned explosive earlier this month when the international administration, put in place after the 1995 peace accord that ended the war in Bosnia, ordered a raid on Herzegovacka Bank and nine of its branches.
By the end of the sentence the clauses are so entwined that it takes an effort to remember the main point. The sentence should probably have been rewritten entirely, but a quick fix would have been to excise the clause about the origin of the international administration and use it as a new, second sentence in parentheses. The passage would then read:
-
The situation here, already tense, turned explosive earlier this month when the international administration ordered a raid on Herzegovacka Bank and nine of its branches. (The administration was put in place after the 1995 peace accord that ended the war in Bosnia.)
In addition to the three classic sentence types, there is also the sentence fragment. Despite what some members of the literati teach, there's nothing wrong with using sentence fragments. Think of the ways they can be effective: For variety. For emphasis. Really!
A pedantic magazine editor once objected to a writer’s use of sentence fragments in general, and of single-word sentences in particular. In the heat of the moment, the editor asked the writer: "Do you really think you can use single-word sentences whenever you feel like it?" To which the writer could think of only one reply: “Yes.”
This information was collected from www.gerrymcgovern.com