Snob Appeal

   How long should a sentence be? Long enough to convey the thought, but not so long as to confuse the reader.

   Snob appeal shows up in writing when only other snobs are able to read it, or are even willing to try. If that's your target audience, go for it, and good luck.
   However, if you want a wide readership, write for your neighbor and your mother-in-law.
   Complexicated writing has plenty of snob appeal, but who are you trying to impress? From this editor's chair, the strategy is this: If the reader has to go back and puzzle through it a second or a third time, the writer has failed to communicate.
   In broadcast writing -- news or commercial -- you get one chance to catch the viewer's ear and get the message across. Repetition is possible, of course, in advertising, but that carries the risk of annoying the audience. In print, readers can go back and read the text a second or a third time until they understand it, but they shouldn't have to. Don't make them.
   In earlier years, the idea was to see how complex a writer could make a sentence and still maintain control of it. That was common through the 19th Century, but lost favor when mass circulation newspapers came to be, and competed with broadcasting for readers and listeners.
   Politicians, academics and diplomats are fond of airy phrases that are full of sound and fury, but signify nothing, as Shakespeare wrote. Today, the general reader has little time or inclination to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous writing in tales told by those concerned with appearing more intelligent than they actually are.
   Or, as our philosopher friend Pug Mahoney once put it, "If you sound like you know what you're talking about, people will assume you do. And if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with b.s."