TIP 2 control the number of messages per sentence.
Even a short sentence can be hard to absorb when it conveys too much information. For example, many readers will struggle to process this sentence, even though it contains only twenty-three words: “On Tuesday, experts inspected the car owned by Cohen that was in the accident west of Grove Street at 1:15 a.m.
in Fresno.”Limit, then, both the number of words and the number of messages in your sentences. To achieve this goal, you may want to split a sentence. In particular, watch out for sentences with many prepositional phrases; the above example about Cohen’s car uses on, by, in, west of, at, and in. When you use multiple prepositions, place the critical detail at the end of the sentence to signal that fact’s importance and to make it easier to flow into the next sentence.