always appears that way, when anyone explains what you should do
and what you should try to avoid. But this is all part of an effort to
get back to what will eventually come easily, if not naturally, which
is to produce writing that is talk in print. This may seem difficult to
start with, but it will get easier as you apply these basic guiding
principles.
For most of us the problems seem to start when we graduate from
one level of learning to another. We convince ourselves that, as this
involves understanding more complex ideas and arguments, we must
therefore use long and complicated sentence structures, and difficult
and unusual words to convey them. In reading students’ work I regu-
larly come across mammoth sentences of more than 200 words, replete
with a confusing array of multiple clauses and phrases that come
tumbling out on top of each other. Reading this, examiners are likely
to be confused and lost amidst this jungle of words.
But, equally serious, they will probably walk away from this kind of
essay convinced of three things: first, that students who produce this
sort of work are not clear about what they want to say; second, that
they haven’t planned their ideas with any care; and third, that they
didn’t think through the ideas in the planning stage before they wrote
them. In fact it would be reasonable for examiners to conclude that
they are only now working through these ideas for the first time as they
write.
It should be obvious, then, that the key to writing sentences, as it
is to writing paragraphs, is not to lose your reader. A complex sen-
tence full of multiple clauses is a difficult and perilous terrain for exam-
iners to negotiate. Not only are you likely to lose them as they pick
their way gingerly through this difficult terrain, but by the time they
have reached the end of the sentence they will have forgotten your
original point. To prevent this, try to do two things: keep sentences
relatively short and, wherever it needs it, use a logical indicator (‘but’,
‘if ’, ‘however ’, ‘therefore’, ‘moreover ’, ‘similarly’, etc.) to indicate what
you’re doing.Length
Take the first of these points – length. Wherever possible make your
sentences short and their structure clear. For example, read the fol-
lowing sentence:It’s possible to argue that almost all advertisements, with the
exception of a few, are informative, indeed, as we have already seen,206 WritingHTW27 7/27/01 8:39 AM Page 206