How shorter sentences allow the reader to read quicker and better comprehend what you are trying to tell.

Thinking about what making papers hard to read, the first thing that comes to mind are long confusing sentences. Although there is no real cut off about the maximal number of words in a sentence, it is general accepted that short sentences are easier to read than long ones.

This has all to do with your working memory. How longer the sentence the more working memory it needs. If you are reading a scientific paper, you likely are already trying to grasp new results and concepts. And if you are anything like me you also have a ton of things going on as well. So, your working memory is already dealing with a lot when you come across that long, winded sentence.

Now you might have come across long sentences that did not give you any problems, while others made you go back and reread several times. That has all to do with how they are build.

You might remember that sentences are made up among other things of verbs and subjects. A verb is an action word that does things. While the subject is the thing or person that the action applies to. An easy-to-follow sentence has those two occurring close together and preferable at the start.

This is easy for short sentences. For example:

“The cat ate his food.”

‘The cat’ is the subject here, and ‘ate’ the verb. But when sentences get longer you often stick more than one action and subjects in there. There is a main bit of the sentence, also called the main clause. This bit holds the information. Then there are subclauses or nested clauses, depending on whether you deal with a compound sentence, a complex sentence, or a complex-compound sentence.

A compound sentence has basically two or more verbs and subjects, each verb-subject couple nicely separated by a comma. The following sentence for a recent scientific article is an example:

“Although the correlation approach has aided the characterization of diverse metabolic processes in plants by reducing the dimension­ality of the problem and thus generating a small set of testable hypotheses, it is known to result in a high number of false positive metabolite-transcript associations when used in isolation.” – Singh et al., 2025

This long sentence has four main clauses, which you come across one after the other:

1. The correlation approach aided the characterization.
2. Reduces the dimensionality of the problem.
3. Generating a small set of testable hypotheses.
4. When used in isolation results in high number of false positives.

Taking those main clauses, you can split this long sentence is three:

“The correlation approach aids the characterization of diverse metabolic processes in plants. It does this by reducing the dimensionality of the problem. As such it generates a small set of testable hypotheses. However, when used in isolation it can result in a high number of false positive metabolite-transcript associations.”

At first, I thought that there were only three main clauses. But when I was rewriting it, I subconsciously realised that there was a fourth one. I completely missed the second one listed above. Giving you another illustration about why with shorter easier sentences readers can better grasp what you are trying to say.

In a complex-sentence the main clause is interrupted by one or more subordinate clauses. The following sentence is an example thereof from a recent scientific article:

“When prey animals are captured, the components of the exoskeleton (chitin and lipoproteins) and soon after, the internal organs of the prey, are exposed to a viscous fluid composed of mucilage, ions, and lytic enzymes secreted by the digestive glands which are present on the inner trap surfaces.” – Kreuzer at al., 2025

Here the main clause is:

• When prey animals are captured, they are exposed to a viscous fluid.

The subordinate clauses are:

• The components of the exoskeleton
• The internal organs of the prey

You can rewrite this sentence as follow:

“When prey animals are captured, they are exposed to a viscous fluid. This fluid is secreted by the digestive glands present on the inner trap surfaces. And is composed of mucilage, ions and lytic enzymes. These digest first the components of the exoskeleton (chitin and lipoproteins) and soon after the internal organs of the prey.”

A complex-compound sentence makes it even harder for the reader to follow, as it has both multiple main clauses as well as subordinate clauses.

It might not be possible to rewrite every super long sentence into multiple shorter ones. Sometimes you just need multiple words to name a concept which automatically lengthen your sentence. But even in those cases it is important to keep in mind to keep the main subject and verb near each other, preferable at the start of the sentence.

Prompt

For today’s exercise I like you to go over an article you read that gave you a headage while reading. Highlight all the sentences that run over more than two lines if it is a single column layout, more than 4 lines if it is a double column layout. Pick 5 of the highlighted sentences, identify the main clause and subordinate clauses, and rewrite each sentence into multiple shorter sentences.

Post any questions and/or your original sentence with your rewritten ones below in the comments.

Happy writing