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# The longer version is sometimes easier to read
- URL: https://www.plainfinance.net/break-up-long-sentences-2/
- Published: 2026-08-25T08:20:11.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-25T08:20:11.000Z
- Author: Gary Bandy

I keep a note of sentences that are harder to read than they need to be. Most come from documents that are otherwise careful and correct: it is the writing that lets them down, not the thinking. Here is one I added last week, a definition of fraud.

> Fraud is any intentional act characterised by deceit, concealment, dishonesty, misappropriation of assets or information, forgery or violation of trust perpetrated by individuals or organisations to secure unjust or illegal personal or business advantage.

Read it once and you probably caught the gist. Read it again and try to hold all of it at once — the six kinds of act, the two kinds of actor, the purpose tacked on at the end — and you feel the effort. Nothing in it is wrong. It is simply doing too much before it lets you stop. One sentence, thirty-four words, no full stop until you reach the end and have to reassemble the whole thing in your head. A readability formula scores it at grade 25, well beyond any general reader.

Writing like this is easy to produce and hard to notice. A long, clause-heavy sentence borrows the cadence of a legal definition, and that cadence sounds authoritative and complete. It flatters the writer. The catch is that the completeness sits on the page and not in the reader's head, and the reader is the one who has to do something with it.

The usual advice for a sentence like this is to cut: trim the adjectives, strike a phrase, bring the word count down. So here is the version I would offer instead. Notice that it is longer.

> Fraud is dishonest behaviour intended to gain an unfair or illegal advantage. It can involve deception, concealment, theft of assets or information, forgery, or abuse of trust. Individuals or organisations commit it for personal or business gain.

Thirty-seven words, three more than the original, in three sentences. It scores grade 12, thirteen reading levels easier than the one it replaced. It is easier to read, and it got there by getting longer.

That is the part worth pausing on. Plain English is not the same as short English. What made the first version hard was never its length. It was that one sentence carried three ideas at once and made you hold all of them before it stopped. Splitting it into three — what fraud is, what it involves, who commits it — lets the reader take one idea at a time. The words per sentence fell from thirty-four to twelve. That is the number that matters, not the words on the page.

This is why the delete-key reflex so often disappoints. You cut and cut, the word count drops, and the writing still reads like treacle. Cutting words from a badly built sentence gives you a shorter badly built sentence. The fix is structural, and structure sometimes costs a few more words.

You can go a long way in the other direction, where the setting allows it. The whole idea will compress to five words.

> Fraud is theft through lying.

That scores about grade 1\. A child could read it. It throws away the detail a formal definition needs, so it would be no use in a policy or an audit report. But it marks the far end of the scale, and it makes the point plainly: the clearest version of an idea is rarely the one with the most words in a row, and just as rarely the one with the fewest.

For the reports most of us write, the aim is neither the shortest version nor the simplest. It is the one a busy reader takes in without having to work at it. Sentence length is most of what stands between those two things.

So the next time you tighten a draft, do not begin by counting words. Find your longest sentence and count those instead. Past about twenty, it is probably carrying the load of two or three, and your reader is paying for it. Look for the joints — the 'characterised by', the 'perpetrated by', the point where the sentence turns and a new one wants to begin — and break it there. Give each idea its own full stop.

Then judge the result by the only test that counts: whether a reader gets it first time, not whether it came out shorter. Often it will be shorter. Sometimes, as here, it will be longer. Either way, reach for the full stop before you reach for the delete key.