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Short sentences

Short sentences can be very useful in an essay, but having too many of them can also make it appear as though an eight year old has written the essay:

Jeremy stood waiting. The ball came. He hit it. The ball flew high in the air.

It doesn’t sound very professional does it? One of the problems with having lots of short sentences is that you get a lot of words like ‘the’ and ‘he’ in them. It’s often much better if you combine some of these short sentences into longer, more fluent ones:

Jeremy stood waiting. When the ball came, he hit it making it fly high in the air.

Language that consists of all short sentences is often called primer language. In most situations, your goal is to avoid primer language in your writing. That’s not to say though that the occasional short sentence isn’t a good thing. It’s just that having all short sentences can be monotonous and boring.