Just because everyone else uses a word, it doesn’t mean you have to. When we’re children, we learn useful, concrete words such as ice-cream, house and cat.

If we spoke to our friends the way most people write at work, we wouldn’t have those friends for long. After all, we’d be using bureaucratic words and long-winded phrases that would sound ludicrous if said out loud.

Now that most of us are working from home, we’re relying on our writing skills more than ever before to communicate with colleagues and clients.

Short sentences are easy to read. They grab our attention, increase the reading pace, and make it more likely that we’ll move from one sentence to the next.