To identify today’s trends in writing articles and reports, I conducted research using texts from key newspapers and the Secretary-General’s annual report. The results show a consistent pattern in today’s writing.
The results may surprise you, particularly the number of sentences per paragraph, and paragraphs are much shorter than in the past. This will be due to decreased attention span, with people more disinclined to read long paragraphs.
Sentences will contain many short words of one syllable such as a, the, or, and, of, for, in, at, is, are. Although these words carry little actual meaning, they’re like glue to hold the sentence together, reducing the impact of the multisyllable words. To make your texts more readable, therefore, you should aim to use as many two-syllable words as possible, avoiding long words. The overall average word length in English is around 4.7 characters, or letters.
For business writing or communications in the workplace, to see what the current trend is, I analysed nine articles in the BBC, New York Times and the Guardian news. We can see that the trends are fairly consistent:
1.3-1.9 sentences per paragraph
21-22 words per sentence (or 1.5 lines of text)
4.8-5.1 characters per word
To analyse trends in report writing, I reviewed the first five pages of the Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization 2025. In this case, long words and long sentences are to be expected. UN terminology is usually the culprit in texts that are difficult to read. But the number of sentences per paragraph is fairly consistent with newspaper articles.
1.8 sentences per paragraph
27.7 words per sentence (1.75 lines of text)
5.7 characters per word
To analyse your own writing, perform the document statistics in the editor function of Word. Check YouTube if you are unsure how to do this.
Happy New Year and happy writing!
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Author: Carol Waites
Presentation/editing by Christina O’Shaughnessy
https://worldwidewriting.org/
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Carol Waites (PhD)
Email: carolswritingtips@gmail.com
For more writing tips, consult my website:
https://carolswritingtips.com/writingtips/
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Carol’s memoir of her times at the United Nations, Behind the Flags, is available on Amazon and lulu.com
ISBN 9783952632703 Behind the Flags Amazon
9783952632710 Behind the Flags Black and White Version Amazon (Australia and Japan)
9783952632727 Behind the Flags lulu.com