To really engage your audience, you have to pace your writing. Whether it’s a 450-word blog post, a news release or a 5,000-word bradley witham online feature. And a really effective way to do that is to think of your sentences like Morse Code, which breaks letters down to a series of “dots” and “dashes”. Some letters are represented by the short dots. Others are signified by the longer dashes. So, in your writing, simply think-and write-short-long-short. Or, short-short-long. Or long-short-long.

Like I just did in the bradley witham paragraph you just read. I could’ve opened this article this way:

  • To really engage your audience you have to pace your writing, whether it’s a 450-word blog post, a news release or a 5,000-word online feature; a really effective way to do that is to think of your sentences like Morse Code, which breaks letters down to a series of dots and dashes.

Or this way:

  • To really engage your audience you have to pace your writing, whether it’s a 450-word blog post, a news release or a 5,000-word online feature. And a really effective way to do that is to think of your sentences like Morse Code, which breaks letters down to a series of dots and dashes.

Egad that first sentence is 52 words long. I would’ve lost your attention before the semi-colon. The second alternate opening is slightly better: a 25-word sentence followed by a 28-word sentence to get the same message across. But those are still long sentences for online writing.

In online writing in particular, it’s important to use shorter sentences. Why? People read online copy differently than they read a printed article. It’s okay to write longer sentences in print, but don’t string too many of them together. You’ll lose your reader. Apply the same Morse Code principal when you’re writing for print-short-long-short.

One idea, one sentence. Especially in online writing. If you write a sentence and you’ve got a comma or two in it-and perhaps an additional semi-colon or two, break it up. You’re loading a run-on sentence that’s getting hard to read and follow. You’re expressing two or more ideas in your sentence and it’s getting too long. Guess what? You’re not going to engage your readers. You’re going to lose them. And that doesn’t help your content marketing efforts.

There’s nothing wrong with writing the occasional very short, fragmented or one-word sentence, too. These can be very effective when you’re illustrating with words.

For example: Richards was a serial killer. A very brutal one. He filled in his murder scorecard quickly. Thirty eight. That’s how many people he butchered in one month. Brutal. Vicious. Psychotic. Investigators hunting him used all three of those words to describe Richards, who was finally tracked down and cornered in Amarillo, Tex. He’d vowed never to be taken alive.