Should I prefer long or short sentences in scientific writing?
Currently, I am writing papers with rather short sentences: About half of them contain around 20 words, about 10% to 20% even less. I am doing this for three reasons:
- I find short sentences easier to read,
- prefer to show relationships using other means, such as colons and conjunctions (e.g. thus, because of, but),
- and thought the scientific community agreed upon short sentences being better.
Now I did some research and came upon contrary statements, for instance:
- This presentation from the University of Manchester advises that one use short sentences.
- This article about the science of scientific writing prefers long sentences.
- The ACS Style Guide promotes the happy medium.
So: Should I use long or short sentences, or a mixture, in scientific writing? Why?
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As always, writing style is only a means to an end (in technical writing, at least), so there exist no rules that must always be followed. Still, there are some general ideas that lead to good writing. I'll provide an analogy from Software Engineering.
In Software Engineering, we have the concepts of cohesion and complexity of a piece of code, let's say a function. A function is said to have high cohesion if all relevant parts to some task are handled by this function. This is considered good, as the reader only needs to read this function to understand the execution of a task.
A function has high complexity if it is big and/or nasty, i.e. difficult to read. This is considered bad.
When creating a function, you must sometimes be careful to make the function not too complex while remaining cohesion. The same can be said of writing: your piece of text is most understandable if all relevant information is in one place (in this case a sentence, but we can also consider this on the paragraph level), as long as it isn't too complicated to read.
I see two reasonable approaches here:
Maximize cohesion while keeping complexity under a fixed 'limit'. This means writing long sentences when you can, i.e. when they can be understood. This is the approach that I personally seem to employ. (I don't consciously look at the length of my sentences unless they are way too big)
Minimizing complexity while keeping the cohesion above a fixed 'limit'. This means writing sentences as short as you can afford. A risk of this approach is that you sentences get too much 'communication overhead': if you have a lot short sentences, you must indicate the relation between those sentences. If that 'glue' has the size of half the length of your sentence, readability is at risk.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33803. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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You want to do whatever makes the text easiest to understand. For me, that means a mix of long and short sentences.
Scientific writing is already going to be dense and complex. There are times when you have to write long sentences because you have to string a lot of information together, and separating the ideas will make them less clear. When you can, break up those long sentences with shorter ones. It will make the material more digestible, and give the reader someplace to rest between thoughts, if that makes sense.
You don't have to talk down to your audience, but there's no reason to put them to sleep, either. Paragraph-long sentences become a soporific drone to the reader's inner narrator. Short ones keep folks up.
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