Short sentences. Does your sentence have more than ten words* in it?

Why?

Maybe it has a lot of little connecting words like ‘to’ or ‘it’.

Maybe your sentence is about a cat on a mat?

Or, and this is more likely, your sentence is a bit waffly.

WHITTLE THE WAFFLE.

CUT THE CLUNK.

REDUCE THE REDUNDANT.

And worship at the shrine of the full point. The full stop. The dot we were given by God to make our sentences punchy, snappy and articulate.

Avoiding cliché can help with this. So too can remembering that less is more. Oh. But that’s a cliché you say? Ok. Well some clichés exist for a reason, kay?

*Ten words is not set in stone naturally. You can have more. You can have lots more. Just remember to use your friend the M dash or the comma. The comma gets a bad press but I will talk about that another time. I am waffling.