Avoiding long and disorganised sentences

A long and complex sentence is only a good sentence if it is easy to follow. There are several ways that you can avoid writing long sentences that are disorganised and confusing for your reader. These include: using appropriate linkers using parallel structures and appropriate punctuation using more sentences. Think carefully before you present a number of separate points or pieces of information. Don’t simply write them one after the other in a single sentence as they occur to you. Think of a clear way of integrating them into one or more sentences so that the points are easy to read. Read this sentence from an essay on management systems. In a management system such as this, staff become chiefly concerned with pleasing their managers and they get stressed and they lose focus on the needs of the company and they are unable to carry out core operations in the best possible way, so the system is acting to the detriment of the organisation. What’s wrong: The sentence is garbled, with too much repetition of ‘and’. Using appropriate linkers You can create two or more sentences, with clear linking, instead of one very long sentence: In a management system such as this, staff become chiefly concerned with pleasing their managers.