People love long poems. There are great, epic, long poems in the world. That said, Writer’s Relief oversees many poetry submissions over the course of a year, and this remains true: Shorter poems seem to be more readily picked up by editors than longer poems. In poetry contests, tight line restrictions can mean many words must be left on the cutting room floor.

Regardless of why or where you’re submitting your poems, here’s what matters most at the end of the day: Whether you’re writing a long poem or a short poem, poetry is about condensed language.

Get that? Condensed. Some poets talk about an economy of language in poetry. Whatever you call it, it means getting rid of absolutely all unnecessary words and phrases that don’t carry their weight and then some.

Nothing distracts your reader as much as grammatical errors, whether they be misplaced commas, dangling modifiers, or pronoun agreement problems. Perhaps the most noticeable of these errors are sentence-structure errors—sentence fragments and run-on sentences. It is always helpful to have a proofreader, like those at Writer’s Relief, look over your creative writing before sending it out for publication. Here are some tips on how to recognize, correct, and even avoid fragments and run-on sentences.