How to Shorten Long Sentences

Most readability formulas use the number of words in a sentence to measure its difficulty. The longer the sentence, the more difficult it is to understand. Try, therefore, to keep the average sentence length of your sentences to 20-25 words. The following is an example of a sentence that is much too long at 48 words and is difficult to understand. One of the reasons it is so difficult to follow is because it does not follow the standard Subject-Verb-Object format, or in other words, who did what when, how and where.

RAY reported 4Q21 earnings of Bt343mn, down 42% YoY and 45% QoQ. This was 9% below our forecast and 20% lower than BB consensus. While RAY booked sales revenue at almost the same level as we expected and delivered a 1.7 ppt larger GPM vs our forecast, a higher than expected loss of its mechanical business (-Bt177mn vs -Bt59mn) and abnormally high SG&A expenses pulled down the actual earnings from our forecast.

The following is one way to shorten the sentence and make it easier to understand. This can be done by providing the details of the result in the first sentence and then providing the reasons that caused it the result to be lower than expected:

RAY reported 4Q21 earnings of Bt343mn, down 42% YoY and 45% QoQ, 6% below our forecast and 15% lower than the Bloomberg consensus estimate.(24 words, but ok) The lower-than-expected result was due to 1) a higher-than-expected loss of its management business of Bt177mn vs. our forecast of a loss of Bt59mn; 2) and abnormally high SG&A expense. This was despite revenue being in line with our forecast and a GPM that exceeded our estimate by 1.7 ppt.