#18 On Long Sentences!

     Hi English learners! Do you like posts with common mistakes? Today is time for some more:)
     A common mistake we are going to discuss here is making your sentences too complicated. Your English sentences are sometimes so complicated that even a teacher can`t understand what you mean:) Long sentences usually have very many mistakes. The longer the sentence, the greater the chance it will have many mistakes:)
     If you want to check whether you make this common mistake or not, take a piece of your writing and read it. If a sentence takes up nearly a whole paragraph, be sure it is exactly what I mean here. It is a complex sentence with many clauses and structures and everything that makes it impossible to understand and sounds very weird and strange.

I once came across a sentence that had nearly 10 lines! Would you be able to understand what the author meant? And can you imagine how many mistakes that piece of writing had! I didn`t even count them:)

     My advice is BREAK A LONG SENTENCE INTO SIMPLE SENTENCES. It will save you many troubles, I promise:) This tip is not only for writing, but for speaking as well!
     Here I would like to introduce some structures that help to make your English sentences correct, easy and listener-friendly. Remember that we say:
let sb. do sth. (e.g. Let me have a look at that letter.)
make sb. do sth. (e.g. I don`t like my parents because they make me study English.
                                   I like him because he makes me laugh)
want sb. to do sth. (e.g. My parents want me to study English.)
     As you can see, we don`t need any that-clauses here. We simply use an object+verb after let, make and want. NOTE that in the last sentence (with want) we need to before a verb.
     I hope this little tip was helpful and you will make fewer mistakes when speaking English!