What’s the Best Length for Sentences, Paragraphs, and Chapters?

Sentences: Before the days of television, radio and the Internet, the guidelines were no more than 23 – 29 words per sentence. Today, the max is 14 -18. Long sentences aren’t just difficult for people who struggle with reading, they’re also a problem for highly literate people.

Long sentences force your reader to slow down and work harder to understand what they’re reading. This isn’t something people want to do, even if they’re familiar with the subject or language you’re using. Today’s readers want to understand your point and move on, quickly. More and more, readers are scanning rather than reading copy.

Paragraphs: An entire paragraph should contain a single focus.
If you find that you’re writing about something different from your initial sentence, your paragraph is probably too long and your focus has wandered. If a paragraph is too short, it may be because the initial idea has not been developed sufficiently. 
 
Writing experts recommend paragraphs of no more than 150 words in three to eight sentences. Paragraphs should never be longer than 250 words. Vary the lengths of your paragraphs to make them more interesting. As with sentence length, if all paragraphs are the same size your writing will be choppy.
 
Chapters: Here’s what the Book Mechanic has to say about the subject of length.

In the olden days of writing it was fine to drone-on for tens of thousands of words per chapter, with little thought for the reader’s attention span. This is especially rampant in epic fantasy and sci-fi.

Today we’ve got media attacking our attention from every direction — young and old, city and country. And all us writers want to do is sell more books to our readers, keeping them happy as long as we can.

Shorter chapters make for a great stopping point. Maybe your reader has ten minutes at night set-aside for reading. Maybe your readers have a short train commute twice a day. When we divide our chapters into smaller, potato chip bites, we give our readers a great place to stick the bookmark.But a funny thing happens when we give our readers a place to pause……they keep reading.
 
Note:  DO NOT worry about the length of your sentences, paragraphs or chapters when you’re writing your first draft. But DO consider their length on your rewrite. Your readers will thank you!
 
The more you pay attention to the above when you’re reading, the more your brain will transfer just the right affect to your writing.
 

Enjoy!

Jasmyne