Long and short of it

I was reading this discussion about Hemingway App on Hacker News and it got me thinking about my own writing style.

A decade back, I used to write longer sentences that packed in more thoughts with a varied rhythm. Over time though, I realised that I make more mistakes grammatically this way and the only way I could write better was by writing shorter sentences.

A sentence that says one thing and the second thought, gets shifted to a different sentence. Earlier this second thought would get tucked in between em-dashes or after a semicolon. In a way I traded emotion for clarity.

Now I’m on that old path again; to breath in some emotion into my writing. I want to re-discover that rhythm, write longer sentences and write naturally again.