Sentences.

Short sentences are very contemporary. This comes from Spiked online.

The piece offers a grim reminder of the growing charge sheet against Corbyn’s Labour. Mirvis references the reported 130 outstanding cases cases of anti-Semitism being investigated by the party, as well as the Jewish MPs who have effectively been driven out by vile racist abuse.

Speaking today, at the launch of Labour’s ‘race and faith manifesto’ no less, Corbyn said ‘anti-Semitism in any form is vile and wrong’. He said ‘there is no place for it’ in Labour, reminding the audience that his is the party that ‘passed [the] Human Rights Act, that set up the Equality and Human Rights Commission’.

I have highlighted the four sentences in these two very short paragraphs to show how modern journalism works. Pithy, short sentences laid side by side like rank upon rank of soldiers.

But what if you want to be a bit more leisurely? What if you want a sort of chatty paragraph? Why not try and hide some clauses in those sentences?

We could write this:

Lawyers are only interested in money. Lawyers pay you compliments. Compliments are free!

Here is how Charles Dickens handles it:

It was a maxim with Mr Brass that the habit of paying compliments kept a man's tongue oiled without any expense; and that, as that useful member ought never to grow rusty or creak in turning on its hinges in the case of a practitioner of the law, in whom it should be always glib and easy, he lost few opportunities of improving himself by the utterance of handsome speeches and eulogistic expressions.

So what use is this?

One of the huge problems today is getting the institutions to listen to you, You can e mail them and get your email returned with a brief note: 

…unfortunately Miss Bossie-Boots is out of the office at the moment… 

…If you want to make a complaint press four...

A good letter does the trick every time. With an envelope and a stamp.

Robin Cooper wrote a book about this called the Timewaster Letters. Here is an example of his skill:

You might think that good letters need quite long paragraphs to make them look impressive. Notice the shortness of the sentences though and the modest size of the paragraphs.

The style nowadays is to use a lot of full stops. 

A level students only:

In your writing, short sentences are much easier to understand, and therefore mark, than very long ones. The day of the very long sentence and the very long paragraph has passed, I am afraid. Use full stops or, if you want to be clever: throw in a couple of colons; semi-colons too: it all adds up.

For those interested in long words, “táxis” is the Greek word for a rank of soldiers and so if you put the ranks (aka sentences) side by side, you get paratáxis which is the word for short sentences strung alongside each other in a paragraph.
KISS – keep it simple, stupid.