One aspect of brief writing that most lawyers don’t think about is paragraph and sentence length, and their effect on the reader. As a general rule, shorter paragraphs help keep the reader engaged with each sentence, while longer paragraphs tend to make the reader begin to skim, searching for the most pertinent information and disregarding the rest. However, a series of short paragraphs can make the writing seem choppy, bouncing from one idea to the next. The same generalities also apply to length of sentences. The answer in brief writing, as in writing a novel, is a blend of sentence and paragraph lengths. The variety provides energy to the writing. This may come naturally in your own brief writing. However, lawyers do seem to…