Even if your averages are great, you can still play with your longest sentences.
Your second sentence is long: A friend of mine upon embarking on his spiritual journey often pulled that quote out of his pocket to examine its deeper meaning. We get into opening paragraphs later, but especially in your first few sentences, you want to try to keep it short and make people curious. This sentence makes me tired rather than excited about reading on.
The following is also a long sentence (and “to be hit with” is a passive phrase you can make active): For those who need to be hit with hard data accompanied by the tune of number crunching, Sally Hogshead’s home on the web has got the neuroscience covered.
While using quotes is a great idea to increase the credibility of your blog posts, you have to be a little careful that they don’t interrupt the overall flow of your content so much that your reader finds it hard to follow you. (Flow is a topic we’ll talk about later in this course – but I thought it might be useful to share this comment now).
Enchant readers. Woo customers. Win business.