No writer of English has been more infamous for writing short sentences than Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway; yet Hemingway’s shortest novel, The Old Man and the Sea, brims with long, crystalline, evocative strings of words, with a period at the end.

The lesson? Contrary to what writing teachers frequently tell us, don’t worry about the length of your sentences; worry that each word pulls its own weight. Whenever someone tells you to write in short, declarative sentences, refer them to this 60-word passage from Hemingway:

The shark’s head was out of water and his back was coming out and the old man could hear the noise of skin and flesh ripping on the big fish when he rammed the harpoon down onto the shark’s head at a spot where the line between his eyes intersected with the line that ran straight back from his nose.

The goal is not to write in short sentences, but to make every word count.