This post about writer's sentence length and sales has been making its way around a few of the blogs I read. Highly recommended. The conclusion (based on a rather small sample) is that shorter sentences sell more books.
Since I've been in the writing process of paper writing lately, I wondered if I shouldn't be writing shorter sentences. Of course, writing for economic journals is different from popular writing. At the same time, the same principles might apply. A quick google search turned up this paper by Laband and Taylor. They look at the impact of a number of quality measures, including words per sentence, on subsequent citations for a sample of articles from The Journal of Political Economy and The Review of Economics and Statistics. They found almost nothing. The one characteristic that matters is paper length--longer papers are cited more. You might think that, even if it doesn't matter within journals, writing characteristics may make a difference to what journal a paper gets published in. The linked paper cites another paper by Laband who looks at submissions to JPE and finds no effect. Still, it might matter at other journals and the sample is small and from over 20 years ago. Nevertheless, I'm inclined to believe the results until something better comes along. And it's too bad--I prefer (to write and read) short papers.
Since I've been in the writing process of paper writing lately, I wondered if I shouldn't be writing shorter sentences. Of course, writing for economic journals is different from popular writing. At the same time, the same principles might apply. A quick google search turned up this paper by Laband and Taylor. They look at the impact of a number of quality measures, including words per sentence, on subsequent citations for a sample of articles from The Journal of Political Economy and The Review of Economics and Statistics. They found almost nothing. The one characteristic that matters is paper length--longer papers are cited more. You might think that, even if it doesn't matter within journals, writing characteristics may make a difference to what journal a paper gets published in. The linked paper cites another paper by Laband who looks at submissions to JPE and finds no effect. Still, it might matter at other journals and the sample is small and from over 20 years ago. Nevertheless, I'm inclined to believe the results until something better comes along. And it's too bad--I prefer (to write and read) short papers.
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