Sentence Structure for Writers (2017)

The principle of end weight is a special case of a more general principle: sentences are usually easier to understand when syntactically related words are close to each other, all else being equal. A more precise version of Strunk and White's "keep related words together".

The interesting thing is that in English this generally pushes you to put short phrases before long phrases, as described in the article, but in languages with other word orders you can get the opposite effect. For example in Japanese the verb is always the last thing in a sentence, and so the way to keep related words together is actually to put long phrases before short phrases. So you'll often get sentences with structures like [[very long object] [short subject] verb].

I (kind of) know multiple languages and they all have different word orders. I find it interesting that my brain is able to switch from expecting information to be received in one order to another. Each word order feels normal to me in its respective language, mix them and they will feel weird. It's like my brain is able to process information in different orders, but there are feature flags to enable them based on the language used.