: Re: 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.

@Odierno164

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In the broader technical writing field, we often consider the Flesch Reading Ease metric, and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level metric, and the underlying assumption tends to be that one should write for the lowest grade level and highest reading ease score that one can and still retain the requisite technical meaning and detail. That is due to the generalized and often untypified audience we face in writing manuals, procedures, conceptual descriptions and technique descriptors; in this instance, you presumably know the general reading level of your intended audience is high, so I'd tend to balance your writing for that target audience in specific.

This would support the "mixed length" approach previously suggested, but I would add that there are a number of online analyzers which can help you assess the Flesch and Flesch-Kincaid scores of a given piece of text: it might behoove you to test your approaches to see how well you can match the expected reading level of your audience.

I'd also add the caveat that your goal in all cases is to serve your audience, and their task in acquiring and comprehending the information and concepts being presented: where longer, more complex sentence structures better support the information being presented, use them. Where shorter sentences get the point across, use them. If several linked concepts are essential to present together to aide in comprehension of a meta-concept, then perhaps semicolon splices and comma splices are appropriate.

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