IMAGE SOURCE: TYLERVIGEN.COM*A. The modern English sentence is short, averaging below 20 words per sentence.(1) From "The Principles of readability" by William DuBay:
In 1880, a professor of English Literature at the University of Nebraska, Lucius Adelno Sherman, began to teach literature from a historical and statistical point of view.
He compared the older prose writers with more popular modern writers such as Macaulay (The History of England) and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He noticed a progressive shortening of sentences over time.
He decided to look at this statistically and began by counting average sentence length per 100 periods. In his book (1893), Analytics of Literature, A Manual for the Objective Study of English Prose and Poetry, he showed how sentence length averages shortened over time:
Pre-Elizabethan times: 50 words per sentence
Elizabethan times: 45 words per sentence
Victorian times: 29 words per sentence
Sherman’s time: 23 words per sentence.
In our time, the average is down to 20 words per sentence.
(2) Ellegard Norm: The modern English sentence has an average of 17.6 words per sentence. (From 1978 study by Swedish researcher Alvar Ellegard of 1 million words corpus of 20th century American English writing called the Brown Corpus collected by Brown University in 1964)
(3) "What is Happening to Written English?" at
http://harrisonrichard.com/article1.htmlEssentially, the sentence has become shorter – quite dramatically. In a study by Brock Haussamen (1994) using text from a variety of sources, the average sentence length was shown to have reduced from 40-70 in the period 1600-1700 to the low 20s in the 1990s.
Year 1600 - 1700: Sentence length 40 - 70 words
Year 1800 - 1900: Sentence length 30 - 40 words
Year 1990s: Sentence length 20s
B. Recommended average number of words per sentence in legal documents:15 words (Federal Register Document Drafting Handbook, October 1998)
Between 15 and 18 (“Plain English: Eschew Legalese” by Judge Gerald Lebovits, New York State Bar Association Journal, November/December 2008)
18 words (“Appellate Practice—Including Legal Writing From A Judge’s Perspective”, by Judge Mark P. Painter)
20 words or fewer (US Federal Aviation Administration “Writing Standards,
20 words (“Legal Writing in Plain English” by Bryan A. Garner)
20 words (“How to write clearly” from European Commission)
20 to 25 words (“How to create clear announcements” Project on the Use of Plain Language, by Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission”)
20 to 25 words (“Tips for Better Writing in Law Reviews and Other Journals” by Joseph Kimble, Michigan Bar Journal, October 2012)
22 words (“Just Writing: Grammar, Punctuation, and Style for the Legal Writer” by Anne Enquist and Laurel Currie Oates)
25 words (“Mightier Than the Sword: Powerful Writing in the Legal Profession” by C. Edward Good)
C. Comparison of average sentence length of several writers from
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/topic6b/auth_style/8auth2.htmJane Austen: 42
John Steinbeck: 18.4
D. H. Lawrence: 13.5
D. From "Editing Tip: Sentence Length" at
https://www.aje.com/en/arc/editing-tip-sentence-length/" ... the average sentence length for Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who can be considered representative of a modern English writer with a general audience, is 12 words ..."
E. From " The long sentence: A disservice to science in the Internet age" at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201190063/pdfIf we want the fullness of science in necessarily long papers to be appreciated, it must increasingly be written in short sentences.
F. From "Three ways to write like Warren Buffett" by Ian Harris at
https://www.managementtoday.co.uk/three-ways-write-warren-buffett/article/1334430But what’s interesting is if you study Warren Buffett’s writing over 50 years, there’s a correlation between success and simplicity. Basically, the richer he becomes the simpler his writing.
• From 1974 to 2013, the average words per sentence falls from 17.4 to 13.4.
• The age you’d need to be to understand his writing falls from 17 years old in 1974, to just 12 years old in 2013.
Despite all this evidence, I still meet people who are scared to make their writing simple. They say, ‘It's all very well for you, but I have to sound professional. We don't talk like that in my business.’
Usually all I do is tell them: if plain English is good enough for Warren Buffett, it’s good enough for you.
G. The longer the sentences, the less readers understand, according to research by the American Press Institute (API).The research, based on studies of 410 newspapers, correlated the average number of words in a sentence with reader comprehension.
• When the average sentence length was fewer than eight words, readers understood 100 percent of the story.
• Even at nine to 14 words, readers could understand more than 90 percent of the information.
• But move up to 43-word sentences, and comprehension dropped to less than 10 percent.
Source:
https://freewritingtips.wyliecomm.com/2009/11/november-2009/H. Contrary view by Joseph Williams (author of "Towards Clarity and Grace") and George Gopen (Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Rhetoric at Duke University): It's not the length of a sentence that makes it difficult to understand but its structure.From "The Science of Scientific Writing" by George D. Gopen and Judith A. Swan at
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~swanson/papers/science-of-writing.pdf "When is a sentence too long? The creators of readability formulas would have us believe there exists some fixed number of words (the favorite is 29) past which a sentence is too hard to read. We disagree. We have seen 10-word sentences that are virtually impenetrable and, as mentioned above, 100-word sentences that flow effortlessly to their points of resolution. In place of the word-limit concept, we offer the following definition: A sentence is too long when it has more viable candidates for stress positions than there are stress positions available. Without the stress position’s locational clue that its material is intended to be emphasized, readers are left too much to their own devices in deciding just what else in a sentence might be considered important."
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*Find more information about sentence length in literary works by clicking this link to the Literature Statistics page of Tylervigen.com.