: Re: How do you write long, nonconvoluted sentences? Sometimes, when I show others a long sentence I have written, I am told it is convoluted due to the chaining of dependent clauses. Is there a

@Sarah872

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Solutions:

Write in a linear way, with causes mentioned before affects. Example: "As he was crossing the street, he turned his head because of a burst of light that caught his attention." Written more linearly, this would read: "He was crossing the street when a burst of light caught his attention. He turned his head."

I changed two things.

A) First, I put the burst of light before his attention being caught. Explain the cause first, and then the affect.

B) Second, I removed the word "as" from the beginning and instead put a "when" on the end of that dependent clause. I find that clauses start with "as" tend to make the reader feel as if you have to hold onto that piece of information while trying to comprehend the rest of the sentence...think carefully about your prepositions.

Organize your clauses such that a modifying clause comes shortly after the thing it's modifying. Example: "The subject did a verb; it was a pitiful subject." can be simplified to "The pitiful subject did the verb."
Same thing for verbs. Have the verb be close to the subject. Example: "The fox, quick and brown, jumped..." can be made more clear as: "The quick brown fox jumped..."
And also, of course, there's the solution of breaking up long sentences into small ones.

When I write I try to break up all sentences into short ones first, and then employ these other techniques on the remaining ones that simply must be long.

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