Difficult sentence very easy
For the reader, to write well means to write easily understandable - you hear this basic idea again and again. But how do you actually write in a reader-friendly way? How do you manage to ensure that even a difficult sentence can be read fluently and thus understood by everyone?
More difficult than expected
You might think that easily understandable sentences can also be written very easily, but this is by no means the case. In fact, often the simplest sentence takes the most work on the part of the author. The reason for this lies in the basic mindset of humans. Thoughts are often unstructured and disjointed. Often we start a sentence without even knowing how to end it.
- This is exactly where you should start your paperwork. Think about what you want to convey to your reader and just write down what comes to mind first. The wording is completely irrelevant at this point, first of all it is only about the content of your sentence.
- Now read through the sentence again. It will probably be a lot more difficult to understand than you would have guessed while you were writing it. After all, your thought seemed clear and plausible to you!
Complicated sentence very simple
So that the reader can better understand the sentence you have written, but which is probably still very complex, you should revise it now. If you only apply a few basic rules, a difficult sentence will be much easier to read.
- The first and foremost basic rule when revising complicated sentences is: describe only one thought per sentence. So look back at your sentence and think about where one thought ends and another begins. At this point you should put a point. Do not forget, however, that you will most likely have to revise the second part of the sentence, which has now been separated, so that it is linguistically coherent again.
- Closely related to this first recommendation is a second: use as few commas as possible. One or two commas per sentence are not a problem; anything else will just make your text unnecessarily complicated and difficult to read. For example, you should replace some commas with periods according to the "one thought per sentence" rule. If your sentence contains several subordinate clauses, you should separate them out and rephrase them as independent main clauses.
- Do not forget that you can use not only periods and commas as punctuation marks, but also semicolons ("semicolons") and hyphens. If you absolutely can't bring yourself to replace a particular comma with a period, consider a semicolon. It separates the different parts of the sentence from each other more strongly than a comma and thus creates structure, but it does not separate too strongly like a period. Hyphens, on the other hand, are particularly good for insertions and logical conclusions. You also have the advantage that you visually distinguish one part of the sentence from the rest and thus make the sentence clearer.
- In everyday spoken language, we use inversions very often. This means that we are changing the traditional sentence structure from subject-verb-object to emphasize certain aspects of a sentence. An example would be "He's been sleeping since 10 p.m." instead of "He's been sleeping since 10 p.m." In the In written language, you should give a lot of thought to whether there is an inversion in your case is expedient. Depending on the application, it can make a sentence either more difficult or easier to understand - depending on what you want to say.
- In order to make a complicated sentence more reader-friendly, you should also avoid technical terms as far as possible. Why, for example, speak of a "Drosophila melanogaster" when one could simply say "fruit fly" and thus avoid any potential misunderstandings? Incidentally, the same applies to Anglicisms. You may be familiar with the English word, but what about the people among your readers who do not speak English?
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If you follow these basic rules, your sentences will already be much easier to understand and therefore more reader-friendly. Ultimately, however, practice makes perfect. After you have written a few texts, you will find that it is much easier for you to understand the spelling than at the beginning of your writing exercises!
