You’ve been taught to believe that short sentences are childish,
Merely a first step toward writing longer sentences.
You’d like to think your education has carried you well past short sentences.
But you’ve been delivered into a wilderness of false assumptions and bad habits,
A desert of jargon and weak constructions, a land of linguistic barbarism,
A place where it’s nearly impossible to write with clarity or directness.
Without cliches or meaningless phrases.
True, you can sound quite grown-up, quite authoritative, in the manner of college professors and journalists and experts in every field.
(You may be a college professor, a journalist, or an expert in some field.)
How well do they write?
How much do you enjoy reading them?
You’ll make long sentences again, but they’ll be short sentences at heart.
Sentences listening for the silence around them.
Listening for their own pulse.
Here’s an experiment:
Pay attention to all the noise in your head as you go about writing.
*
Much of it is what you already know about writing, which includes:
The voices of former teachers, usually uttering rules.
Rules like, ”Don’t begin sentences with ‘and.’”
(It's okay. You can begin sentences with “and.”)
The things everybody knows or assumes about writers and how they work,
Whether they’re true or not.
The things you feel you must or mustn’t do, without really knowing why.
The things that make you wonder, “Am I allowed to...?”
(Yes, you’re allowed to. Not forever and always, but until you decide for yourself what works and what doesn’t.)