Be concise

To keep content understandable, it should be:

  • Specific
  • Informative
  • Clear and concise
  • Short sentences, free of jargon

Keep sentences short and sweet

Craft sentences at 25 words or fewer, whenever possible.  Studies show:

  • When the average sentence length in a piece was fewer than eight words long, readers understood 100 percent of the story.
  • At 14 words, they could comprehend more than 90 percent of the information.
  • But move up to 43-word sentences, and comprehension dropped below 10 percent.

We also recommend varying sentence length. Switching things up helps you keep readers interested. This tactic will also give you better control of your content’s tone — a text with only short sentences can unintentionally sound terse. The occasional longer sentence adds a bit of narrative interest (and can help a piece of writing sound friendlier, too).