Blogs at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Posts Tagged ‘sentence length’

Issue 2, No. 10 – Sept. 11, 2007

September 11th, 2007 by Heath Meriwether

Shout Outs

When sentences run the same length throughout a story, it gets monotonous. Readers drop off. The solution: Vary sentence length. Read and listen to Kenyon Farrow’s lead on an international AIDS conference this summer to see how he varies sentence length and punctuation to great effect (the emphasis is mine):

HIV experts gathering at the International AIDS Society conference in Sydney next week are sure to champion the need for greater treatment access in the developing world—and to point out that in the United States, by contrast, drugs have made HIV a manageable disease. But that is only partly true: Many HIV-positive people in this country confront financial barriers and a labyrinth of rules that keep life-saving medications beyond their reach. For them, HIV is not manageable at all.

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