False economy What’s in it for me? Understand what makes the

It’s helpful to be aware of traditional writing 
structures and readability indexes, but don’t 
be over-reliant on them.
There’s nothing wrong with the proper sentence 
structures you were taught in grade school, but 
keep in mind: If each sentence is structured the 
same way, the writing will be pretty dull.
It’s wise to remember that, first and foremost, 
the job of a sentence is to express a complete 
thought, and there’s more than one way to do 
this. Classic sentence structures are guidelines. 
They’re there to ensure your subject, verb and 
predicate are in the right place, and thus to 
make 
your 
complete 
thought 
easily 
understandable.
But you can strike the subject, verb and 
predicate and still have a useful sentence. For 
example, a paragraph can end with a one word 
sentence. Rejoice! (You see?)
Another piece of advice writers are often given is 
to keep things simple. This is true as well, and 
it’s always a good idea to keep an eye out for 
needless adverbs and adjectives that you can 
shed to make your sentences clearer. But you 
don’t want to write one boring short sentence 
after another.
Remember, the goal is clear communication. 
While simple sentences like, “The cat sat on the 
mat,” are perfectly understandable, you’re not 
communicating well if you’re boring the reader to 
sleep. And a paragraph of such sentences is 
tedious.
Helpful advice can also come from a readability 
index, but this is another guide you shouldn’t 
place too much confidence in.
Since the late 1800s, researchers have been 
examining the properties of clear writing and it’s 
given us formulas like the Flesch Reading Ease 
Index, which provides a score to suggest how 
difficult it is to read a piece of writing. There’s 
also the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, which tells 
you how much schooling the reader needs to 
understand the writing.
Other guides include the Gunning fog index and 
the Dale-Chall Formula, the latter of which takes 
into account how many “difficult” words appear 
in your writing.
These analytics can be insightful – for example, 
Flesch’s formula tells us that the ideal sentence 
has an average of 18 words – but they can’t tell 
you everything. In fact, you could write pure 
nonsense and, as long as you used basic 
vocabulary and relatively short sentences, it 
would score well on the indexes.