Whenever you write you should keep this in mind –
Really clear language is quite hard to find.
So as you are writing you certainly ought
To attempt to control it by keeping it short.
It’s rather like football. As you know then,
If you hold the ball close all those horrible men
Wearing different shirts cannot take it away
And you have some control over whatever may
Or may not happen next.
It’s a matter of reach.
And this is exactly what I’d like to teach
With this doggerel; that it is usually wrong
just to keep writing and writing, inserting clauses & commas,
each one, rather than adding to meaning, tending to distract from it
until,
should any of the readers who started with you still be reading at all,
even the most patient, persistent, and generous of them
is likely,
from linguistic exhaustion if nothing else,
to reach the deplorable conclusion that
although the subject seemed to be most interesting a while ago
it has become, over the course of very recent time,
suddenly and unaccountably
much less fascinating than they at first imagined –
although they may not realise that this is simply because you,
the writer of all this,
have committed that most basic of writers’ errors
which is
To let all your sentences get far too long!