[meerita]

As a non native english-speaker, my struggles in my original language is finishing sentences early instead doing long ones. Sometimes I write long phrases, full of commas, semicolons, etc. I found that in enlish people tend to be more conservative when writing sentences.

[geocrasher]

Native English speaker here. For me, any sentence with more than one comma is telling me that it's not one sentence. It's two, three, or four sentences. And to be clear, I'm talking about sentences that are very long, not sentences that contain a list of items such as the previous sentence. Example:

-----------------------------------------------------------

The more I write, the more I realize that sentence structure matters, as does grammar, and even spelling, and also choice of words, which affects some readers for whom English is a non-primary language.

As I write more, I realize that sentence structure, grammar, and spelling matter. My choice of words is important because unnecessary complexity may negatively affect some readers.

-----------------------------------------------------------

It wasn't always this way. 50 years ago, it was common for sentences to be much longer. I often read stories to my wife that were written in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. They are personal accounts, not professional writing. Life stories. They quite often include sentences that take more than one breath to read aloud, because they are so incredibly long that they deplete me of oxygen before I can finish reading the sentence, which I do find quite difficult to read since I am now concentrating on my breathing instead of on the written word, which is not just awkward but also distracting.

YMMV.

[RMPR]

This is also the case in my native language (French), I assume it's pretty common for Latin languages.

[ethanbond]

I only speak English but share this hypothesis based on reading translated novels from Latin language writers. Jose Saramago (Portuguese) is a striking example. Beautiful stuff but characteristically different from how native English speakers structure things.

[meerita]

I have troubles, I guess, to know exactly when to period or comman depending on the sound of the pause. To me it is like everything is short paused, so everything will be a comma :D