“Isn’t love any fun? Marjorie said.

“No,” Nick said.”

Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time

Writing short sentences seems at first like it’s meant for small children. It’s difficult. I myself have the tendency to add embellishments. 

But nonetheless, “simple sentences offer the most straightforward way to get to the point quickly and clearly” according to Constance Hale in Sin and Syntax. Do you want to be clear or do you want to be graceful?

This of course depends on the medium in which you are writing. For a blog post (such as this one), perhaps shorter sentences might be more appropriate, especially if the blog is for marketing purposes. In that case, you’re looking to reach a broader audience and trying to get them to understand the product, service, or information you’re sharing. If you’re writing a novel, a longer sentence with lots of flourishes may be more fitting, to fit with the style, length, and tone of the piece. 

Unless you’re someone like Ernest Hemingway. He is the king of short and sweet sentences in his prose. He gets the point across and keeps it curt. Typically I’m not the biggest fan of him, but writing something like “In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.” hits me right in the feels. The quote used above is also a short and sweet passage, with a lot more meaning than it initially lets on. That’s the beauty of subtlety in writing. 

Yes, it is wildly important to show, not tell. But the thing more important within that is to be subtle. If you want to show, don’t tell me it “looks like…” That’s not exactly subtle. That’s significantly more obvious than what we’re trying to get at.

Some people have more of a gift for this idea than others. For me, I write in the exact same manner as how I speak, which is both a blessing and a curse. If you’d like me to describe my cat who has one orange spot above his lip and a Batman helmet, I can, and that’s exactly how I’d describe how he looks if you were speaking to me directly. Yes, he looks like an orange and white cat, but he’s got the purrsonality of an 80-year-old man and a face that constantly looks bored or irritated.

Still, that’s not as subtle as I could go, but it’s at least slightly more descriptive than just outright telling you what he looks like. To show, not tell does take a bit of practice, even on my part. I cannot confidently say I’ve mastered that art; in fact, I’m far from it. 

But of course, the “show, don’t tell” method is not for everyone, and if so…

If you like not my writing, go read something else.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy