You’re right; to humans, short sentences do signal persuasive arguments and confidence in your ideas. And not without reason. People often speak longwindedly wh

You’re right; to humans, short sentences do signal persuasive arguments and confidence in your ideas. And not without reason. People often speak longwindedly when they are trying to hide something. But there is another reason someone might use long sentences. They might be trying to express a complicated idea. Sometimes an idea cannot expressed in a short sentence. Usually you can break up a complex idea into a few short sentences, but that might make the reading choppy and hard to follow. A long sentence leads its reader through the connections between ideas. In contrast, separate sentences express the ideas and leave it up to the reader to figure out what the connections are between the ideas. This leaves us with an apparent cognitive bias: if we are distrustful of long sentences, we become distrustful of complex ideas. Given this, I wonder if modern anti-intellectualism stems from this sensible defensive mechanism.