[HN Gopher] Writing one sentence per line
___________________________________________________________________
Writing one sentence per line
Author : Tomte
Score : 690 points
Date : 2022-06-20 09:25 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sive.rs)
(TXT) w3m dump (sive.rs)
| enriquto wrote:
| beautiful html, indeed!
| mixedmath wrote:
| I write a lot of LaTeX and articles. I _sort of_ do this, except
| that I also really want reasonable line lengths. Each sentence
| starts on its own line, but I also hard wrap at 80 characters. I
| have a completely different set of editing tidbits for writing
| equations.
| luhn wrote:
| One big advantage not mentioned in the article particularly
| relevant to this audience: git diffs (or your VCS of choice). One
| sentence per line means diffs will operate per-sentence, rather
| than per-paragraph. This way the diff can capture the
| restructuring of the paragraph (adding/removing/replacing a
| sentence), which gives much more insight than swapping out the
| paragraph wholesale. It also means minor changes (e.g. typo
| fixes) will only add+delete a single sentence, making it much
| easier to identify what has actually changed from one commit to
| the next.
|
| I take this a step further and will often split out a single
| sentence into a clause per line, but this is a judgement call
| rather than a hard and fast rule.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think we need to start changing this. In an era of language
| servers, perhaps our diff tools should be semantic instead of
| line based.
|
| I get so tired of seeing diffs where I add a function and the
| diff shows that I added it inside the previous function instead
| of between them, because it starts the diff one line too early.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Have you tried patience diff?
|
| See `git help diff`
| dahfizz wrote:
| Yes! I find `git diff` to be the most annoying thing about
| git. I can be pretty forgiving of the clunky UX, but the diff
| output is just wrong.
|
| People often say of git, "The porcelain is bad but the
| plumbing is good". The opposite is true for digging, IMO.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Fortunately, git permits the use of external difftools. One
| can easily configure git to use their preferred semantic
| diff tool and git wouldn't even care. The plumbing is
| excellent.
| Groxx wrote:
| Debuggers and stack traces too. _Logic_ is not line-based.
|
| When you get a NPE on a line containing `thing.method(x.y.z,
| q(), w.e().rty())`, which item is it on? Type information is
| insufficient, there could be multiple of the same thing on
| the same line.
|
| Some debuggers are smarter ("step to cursor" sometimes goes
| to in-line locations), but many are not, and most languages
| I've seen will give you precise compile-time error locations,
| but at runtime all you get is _lines_. Lines suck.
| btgeekboy wrote:
| Aside, I'm really excited to move to a newer JDK:
| https://openjdk.org/jeps/358
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| It's mentioned by Mihail Milchev in comment #13. I say that
| exactly because this is the reason I've been doing this for
| years myself.
| majormajor wrote:
| Many GUI diff tools will do this neatly regardless of
| whitespace, FWIW, so this hasn't been a motivator for me for
| code or text.
| davnn wrote:
| I write one sentence per line as well, but use line wrapping to
| make it more readable during writing. Reading long sentences on a
| single line is unpleasant imho.
|
| I'll try switching from line wrap to full display to get a better
| picture of the overall structure.
|
| If the structure is easy to recognize I would probably prefer a
| simple model that tells me a good line length for the current
| line I'm in, e.g. a simple writing plugin for the editor of
| choice.
| vishkk wrote:
| "Words are not forms of a single word.
|
| In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
|
| The world must be measured by eye."
|
| - Wallace Stevens
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is the easy way to do things when writing LaTeX in vim.
| lqet wrote:
| I started doing this mostly for cleaner commits in version
| control systems. After a while I also noticed it made the writing
| more concise. It's much easier to spot redundant "filler"
| sentences.
| abhayhegde wrote:
| Similar advice was given by a famous VC, Tomasz Tunguz, a few
| years ago: https://tomtunguz.com/writing-separate-lines/
| drewg123 wrote:
| Just please, for the love of god, don't do it in slack. Nothing
| annoys me more than a colleague writing a long slack message when
| I'm AFK, and having my watch buzz like an angry bee when they hit
| one carriage return (and send a new slack message) every 10
| seconds.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| You should really be angry at Slack and not your colleagues.
| There are loads of ways to prevent this like sending at most
| one alert per user per minute (if message is unread). It's not
| rocket science.
|
| Most times when loads of people are "doing it wrong" then it's
| the technology that is at fault, and not the people.
| DawsonBruce wrote:
| Over the past year I've disabled all Slack notifications and
| the result is increased focus while I'm writing some code or
| an email. All the messages will be queued up regardless if
| I'm being notified (and disrupted) often. Perhaps give it a
| try!
| drewg123 wrote:
| Yes, I'm angry at slack. No other messaging system I've used
| does this..
| eCa wrote:
| Personally, I have mapped 'send' to cmd+enter, to avoid
| accidentally sending too soon. Also, to make it behave
| similarly within a code block as without.
| lo5 wrote:
| One of the problems with Slack/Discord desktop clients is that
| the message area (center column) tends to be far too wide on HD
| monitors (1200px+), making it difficult to read[1] anything
| that hasn't been manually line-wrapped.
|
| [1] https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
| secondcoming wrote:
| Joke's on you for connecting your watch to Slack.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Sadly, I have no choice. I have a Garmin connected to an
| iPhone. Even when I disable most notifications for an app, it
| will still hit my watch.
|
| On Android, I could filter out which apps could notify the
| watch, on ios, it seems Garmin has not been able to do that.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Ctrl+Return
| amake wrote:
| \\(;D;)/
|
| > be me
|
| > write one sentence per line
|
| > looks like greentext
|
| > mfw
| swamp40 wrote:
| Then they accuse you of reddit spacing.
| 3qz wrote:
| This is awful. It's the LinkedIn writing style and I can't look
| at it without being reminded of all the shitposting that "thought
| readers" do.
|
| Thoughts?
| jyriand wrote:
| I don't think it's awful. As he says you shouldn't publish your
| text that way. In editing phase you will merge one line
| sentences into paragraphs.
| matwood wrote:
| I'm not really a fan of 1 line per sentence _as the default_ ,
| but agree with more breaks. Also know your audience. My default
| structure is:
|
| - Ask for what I want/why did I sent this email.
|
| - Explanation why using logical breaks.
|
| Which usually means I write my email, take the last line and
| make it first.
|
| If I'm emailing a technical colleague I'll include more
| details. CEO, 1 line bullet points.
| mirrorlake wrote:
| My criticism is that nearly the whole page is the comment
| section. The article itself is very short--pasted into an
| editor, ~200 words excluding titles. Perhaps putting every
| sentence on its own line also inflates an author's sense of how
| long their article is.
| dchest wrote:
| Why do you need a longer article for such a simple idea?
| zaps wrote:
| Agree
| MengerSponge wrote:
| This is a good habit if you write LaTeX documents, particularly
| with collaborators. It's much easier to diff a file where each
| sentence has its own line!
| dilap wrote:
| If that's too much trouble, just write your essay as a series of
| tweets. Similar focussing effect.
|
| (And part of why I think the essay-as-tweet thread is so
| popular.)
| clord wrote:
| This is my primary objection to using 80 columns everywhere.
| Markdown specifically is a painful place to require it, but also
| latex and HTML. For source code, 80-col works out ok most of the
| time since "sentences" are relatively short, but even there I
| prefer to use more semantic line breaks when the style guide or
| formatting tool does not omit them.
| pauljonas wrote:
| Jose Saramago would hate this.
| hammock wrote:
| Most news articles are written one sentence per line.
|
| You might not have ever realized this fact because the character
| length of a typical line is so short, both in a columnar
| newspaper and on an ad-ridden website.
| cb321 wrote:
| Most writing style rules are context-dependently apt. The quote
| by Disruptive_Dave of Gary Provost rings true for artistic
| writing. Sentence length limits are more helpful for technical
| writing like papers/documentation, with its many side-details -
| just as a complexity control.
|
| Either way, though, for sentence source formatting, sentences on
| line boundaries also help version control systems since a diff
| shows the delta on a per sentence basis. Note that this is
| _slightly_ different than one per line - it is more integer
| number of lines per sentence since some are multi-line. Same
| ethos, though.
| kwelstr wrote:
| James Joyce best advice? :-O
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| If what you're writing gets rendered as markdown (i.e. a readme
| on github), you can actually publish as one-sentence-per-line,
| because the markdown parser will make them into a paragraph for
| you.
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| I cannot disagree more profoundly with the author. Write in a
| very different way from which you read? From how texts are
| formatted in general?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I used to do this all the time, when I worked for a Japanese
| company.
|
| They used to translate my emails, "in-place," so this allowed the
| translators to insert a line of Kanji characters, below each of
| my lines.
|
| It also taught me to be frugal in my content, but you'd never
| know it, reading my stuff, these days...
| dnpp123 wrote:
| It's also one of the first rule I've learned when communicating
| professionally in Korean.
|
| Write the _exact_ same paragraph, one with an EOL between each
| sentence, one without.
|
| Natives always understood the paragraph with EOL. Personally I
| didn't see any difference but -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| I think it's true all the time, but it shows a lot more when
| you speak in a language where the grammar is super different
| from what you're used too.
| Mageek wrote:
| I absolutely love doing this. I often write in LaTeX, where new
| lines don't effect the typeset output. It is so much easier to
| see git diffs, comment sentences out, move sentences, identify a
| sentence by its line number, etc. as well.
| myfonj wrote:
| Reading this makes me think it might be generally beneficial to
| finally convey the semantics of sentence boundaries to the
| resulting output as well, like some `<p><span>Sentence #1.</span>
| <span>Sentence #2.</span>` wrappers: it would introduce
| possibility (for author or user) to break it into lines again or
| apply any other styling, and might improve interaction (think:
| _select single sentence_ ), or some further processing or
| contextual styling (think _" make all single-sentence paragraphs
| stand out"_.)
|
| Strange there is no truly "semantic" way to mark-up sub-paragraph
| chunk of text in HTML; all 'inline' tags are intended for "words"
| or for including several sentences at once (like emphasis, quote,
| code, sample, mark, etc.). I have some murky memory I've read
| some discussion explaining that the concept of "sentence" is
| quite problematic and in no way universal, but cannot dig it up
| now.
|
| (This comment started as _But how are we supposed to sneak our
| beloved double spaces between sentences in the output now?_ semi-
| pun, but after all, this post-processing idea answers it.)
| dang wrote:
| I tell founders not to write like this, at least for HN, and I
| edit their launch posts when they do
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/launches), because it reads like a
| sales letter.
|
| But the OP is saying that it's useful to _make_ the sausage that
| way, not sell it that way, which is a different point.
| ngrilly wrote:
| I'm doing that almost systemically when writing Markdown for
| similar reasons to the blog post author.
| longrod wrote:
| For me context is very important. Separating out the sentences,
| although makes them stand on their own, often sounds
| discontinuous and jarring like a too long pause. Not to mention
| how awkward it looks on the page (if double spaced which I
| prefer).
|
| That's not to say it's a bad technique. It might work for some,
| not for others. For me it doesn't.
|
| I have found writing to be much like coding where if you think
| through the idea properly, writing to the end is not such a big
| problem. The main hurdles is getting stuck which is often an
| indicator of a poorly thoughtout idea.
|
| The other thing that helps me escape the over-editting issue is
| putting my words down with as much brevity is possible. The more
| fluff there is, the harder it is to change. Simpler to read,
| simpler to edit.
| hansword wrote:
| You might have missed a part of the article, where author says
| they write single line sentences as 'code', but both Markdown
| and HTML automatically turn concescutive sentences into
| paragraphs, unless you (using a blank line or <p>) explicitly
| end a paragraph.
|
| > Not publishing one sentence per line, no. Write like this for
| your eyes only.
|
| (Edit: added quote from article)
| rvnx wrote:
| This is perfect in the era of fast-food media like TikTok or
| shorts. We don't need long sentences, 140-chars are enough.
| supersrdjan wrote:
| One sentence per line can paralyze your writing. It invites you
| to over-scrutinize each line and lose sight of the whole. It's a
| view that's better suited for analysis than synthesis. So it's
| better for editing than composing.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| I approach this by separating writing from editing. Just keep
| writing, ignore the typos, self-censorship or formatting and keep
| moving.
|
| So, I've build myself an app to make that easier. Essentially,
| it's just a more stupid version of a text box. It's free, it's
| private, and it's meant to put you in the state of flow.
|
| I've been using it every day for the past 3 years or so and I
| know that some people find it useful too, but even if I was the
| only user, I'd still be quite happy with it, since I suck at
| sticking with habits :)
|
| Check it out!
|
| https://enso.sonnet.io
| napolux wrote:
| I like it!
| ryan-duve wrote:
| I just gave this a whirl and I wanted to let you know it's very
| fun! For anyone else that wants to give the demo a shot, here's
| the direct link:
|
| https://write.sonnet.io/
| MrGilbert wrote:
| There is a small typo on the start page:
|
| "[...] to say istead of how you want to say it."
|
| Instead is missing a "n". :)
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Good timing, I took today off to do some (late) spring
| cleaning. Fixed, thanks.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I totally agree. My approach is to just turn of the monitor.
| reirob wrote:
| I made a colorscheme for vim that uses same color for font
| and background. Use it sometimes when I need to write long
| confusing thoughts. It's quite a nice experience, the
| sentences turn out to be similar to the way I would speak,
| but still with more thought and deepness.
| edjw wrote:
| Similar idea I made a few years ago. A text editor with no
| editing allowed and lets you export to Word/MD/HTML for later
| editing
|
| https://first-draft.netlify.app
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Sweet! If you don't mind sharing, did anyone donate through
| ko-fi?
|
| I think there's still potential in writing tools with decent
| UX (iA Writer and such) and I know that some people wanted to
| pay me for Enso, so I'm trying to figure out the best course
| of action: either charge premium for a premium native app or
| let the people chip in. Paid products tend to get more
| valuable feedback.
| edjw wrote:
| I just checked and nobody did. I didn't really promote it.
| Might have helped if I had said what I might do with the
| money to improve it?
| javajosh wrote:
| _> I approach this by separating writing from editing. Just
| keep writing, ignore the typos, self-censorship or formatting
| and keep moving._
|
| You've (re)discovered the old adage: write drunk, edit sober.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Close but, no cigar. Code sober, debug drunk!
|
| https://sonnet.io/posts/code-sober-debug-drunk/
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| MrDunham wrote:
| Here's my biggest critique of Enso: It's not very easy to send
| myself a reminder when I'm back at my computer to use it.
|
| Content: i'm currently on my mobile phone and I absolutely
| adore the idea of Enso (funny enough I'm currently holding &
| feeding my infant named Enzo). I would like to write with it
| and try it when I don't have an infant on my lap but that
| requires me remembering it and looking it up when back on my
| laptop and ready to write something.
|
| I added my email on the mobile sign-up but frankly I don't
| really want a mobile app as 60% of my long-form mobile writing
| is done via voice to text and edited later. What I'd like is a
| "remind me via email to give Enso a try" signup that says "hey,
| this is a reminder to try Enso... The flow focused, low editing
| app for creative writing" or something like that.
| SamBam wrote:
| You want a sign-up on the site that just sends you an email
| and tells you to use it?
|
| You could also just send yourself an email, you know.
|
| Or, if you're fancy, use a to-do list that you can access
| both on your mobile and your computer.
|
| (To be fair, I recall the brain-fog that comes with having an
| infant.)
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Fair enough, but I still think the user could benefit from
| a gentle nudge here:)
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > remind me via email to give Enso a try
|
| I like this. Thanks! Email notifications nowadays are a bit
| of a pain to set up, since they need to contain the physical
| address of the sender in the footer, so this is a piece of
| work I _always_ keep postponing. I was even considering
| dropping that form completely. Maybe I could generate a
| calendar event with a reminder instead? This way I won't have
| to store any data about the user and I could probably piggy
| back on the phone UX when it comes to reminders. Just
| thinking aloud here.
|
| > as 60% of my long-form mobile writing is done via voice to
| text and edited later.
|
| Yeah, your description matches my own usage patterns. And,
| I've reached a similar conclusion. Mobile-first Enso would
| probably have two modes: keyboard + dictation.
| kstenerud wrote:
| When I write for myself, it's all over the place. Mostly it's
| short phrases, unordered lists and the odd diagram, followed by
| lines of --- to separate thought arenas. All of these are
| fragments of ideas that I feel will probably be important to the
| finished piece. Usually about half of them actually are.
|
| I just continue writing down thoughts as they occur, any time
| they happen during the day or during periods of concentration on
| the piece itself. If the current thought is not an extension of
| the last thing I wrote, I make a new line and start the new
| thought.
|
| Here's a small section of draft notes for a technical article
| that I never published: Streaming only for top
| level args, not deeply nested.... ? - With set of files,
| need lots of streams of data. -- How to get metadata when
| ordering not guaranteed?
| ------------------------------------ Is there a way
| to evaluate, send data from smallest piece to biggest piece?
| - Walk the tree, assign weights to branches? If a
| hierarchy contains multiple big data pieces, how to tell the
| receiving function? Some method to pump in top level
| args X items at a time? - 1 item at a time for non-array,
| x bytes at a time for array
| -----------------------------------
|
| Every so often I'll draw another line and summarize everything in
| a way that succinctly discusses what I'm writing about in note
| form. Then I draw another line and start writing notes again.
|
| Eventually, the summary notes start to feel solid in my mind, at
| which point I turn them into prose and then start embedding my
| notes between the paragraphs, turning them into sentences only
| once I feel I know where they should go in the overall piece.
| Once the notes finally disappear from the prose, I have my first
| draft.
| swamp40 wrote:
| I have to do this in my emails. Most people just ignore the
| second and third sentences in a paragraph. No idea why, drives me
| crazy - but this does help.
|
| You can tell they don't read them because they ask questions that
| were answered in them.
| afterburner wrote:
| Although the article does mention this is supposed to be an
| organization trick for your eyes only:
|
| > Not publishing one sentence per line, no. Write like this for
| your eyes only. HTML or Markdown combine separate lines into
| one paragraph.
| crayboff wrote:
| Ironically it seems he may have only read the beginning of
| the article and skimmed past the rest.
| ghaff wrote:
| >No idea why
|
| Because that tends to be how people skim.
|
| If the first sentence of a paragraph doesn't catch their
| attention in some way, they subconsciously assume that the rest
| of the paragraph (which is presumably related) doesn't need to
| be read.
| hinkley wrote:
| Which is why "don't bury the lede" is such important advice.
|
| Also please rehearse what you would say to your family if you
| got into a car wreck and they wanted to check you out at the
| hospital versus "mom is going into surgery for massive
| hemorrhaging."
|
| "Hey son, we're okay, but we got into a bad fender bender and
| we're getting checked out at Hoskin's Hospital. The car is
| dead so can you come pick us up, maybe bring X and Y and have
| your sister check on the cats?"
|
| Is a way shorter moment of sheer terror than switching around
| the sentence fragments at the beginning. Also if you're a
| boss having an unscheduled meeting with someone, stalling the
| agenda is just torturing the other person.
| Groxx wrote:
| This is all also useful advice for helping people deal with
| notifications for work. They might see "@xyz can help you
| with this..." and miss "... when they have time next week".
|
| Help people triage. Make the urgency clear in the first
| couple words. Don't just send "hi" and then wait for a
| response, nor "X is down" when someone else is already on
| it and you're just giving them an FYI.
| warmwaffles wrote:
| Why would you do that in your emails?
|
| /s
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Most people just ignore the second and third sentences in a
| paragraph._
|
| The military expression is BLUF - Bottom Line Up Front. (It
| works for paragraphs as well as for entire documents.)
| golergka wrote:
| Its also very comfortable when you're using vim or vim-emulation
| plugin in another editor.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Or, with a bit more nuance: Semantic line breaks
|
| https://sembr.org/
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _5. A semantic line break SHOULD occur after an independent
| clause as punctuated by a comma (,), semicolon (;), colon (:),
| or em dash (--)._
|
| Uh oh, that's incompatible with standard em dash usage, which
| is with no surrounding whitespace.
|
| (I'm designing a lightweight markup language of my own, and
| it's tempting to special-case an em dash at the end of a line
| that is not preceded by a space, to join to the next line
| without inserting a space, but I've been trying to avoid nuance
| in rules. But I definitely do want to put line breaks after em
| dashes sometimes.)
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| If you are using Markdown you can use an HTML comment--<!--
|
| -->like this. I'm okay with that because there are some edge
| cases [1] in CommonMark that I absolutely need to use one
| anyway.
|
| [1] https://talk.commonmark.org/t/foo-works-but-foo-
| fails/2528
| bloak wrote:
| According to Wikipedia: "Dashes have been cited as being
| treated differently in the US and the UK, with the former
| preferring the use of an em dash with no additional spacing
| and the latter preferring a spaced en dash."
|
| Though I prefer the spaced en dash myself, and I am in the
| UK, I think there's probably a lot of variation on both sides
| of the Atlantic.
| nequo wrote:
| Useless info but in LaTeX, you could write %\n instead of \n
| to prevent the surrounding whitespace.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| A hairline space between em-dashes can be quite visually
| pleasing (in American writing; British uses full spaces
| around en-dashes). Like what Medium does.
|
| But in that case I would prefer that the source text still
| has no spaces. Such things can be added in postprocessing.
| elfrinjo wrote:
| Looks good - but I do not agree with
|
| > 3. A semantic line break SHOULD NOT alter the intended
| meaning of the text.
|
| That should be #1 MUST NOT
| _mattt wrote:
| SemBr author here. I chose SHOULD NOT for this rule for a
| couple reasons: First, as an affordance for text with
| ambiguous or unknown meaning. Second, as a hedge against
| introducing new meaning unintentionally.
|
| Adding a semantic line break inherently changes the
| relationship between words, and we can't always be sure about
| the intended meaning of text. If this were MUST NOT, then any
| modification would risk violating the spec.
|
| Then again, this may be my own, idiosyncratic reading of RFC
| 2119. If you'd like to discuss this further, feel free to
| open an issue on the GitHub repo here:
| https://github.com/sembr/specification/issues
| DarkWiiPlayer wrote:
| Came here to say this too. Huge fan of semantic line breaks,
| both for VCS and for the eyes (makes it easier to parse the
| structure of a document)
| joegahona wrote:
| I read Ken Rand's "10% Solution"[0] in ~2001 on the
| recommendation of longtime Washington Post copy chief Bill Walsh,
| who died a few years ago[1]. I can't believe how much of its
| advice has stuck with me and how much it has helped me. Highly
| recommended for anyone who wants to optimize their writing.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/10-Solution-Ken-Rand-
| ebook/dp/B07FC7G...
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/bill-walsh-copy-
| editor-...
| michaelmior wrote:
| I personally use this approach but mostly because a lot of what I
| write ends up in a git repository and diffs make _way_ more sense
| when there is only one sentence per line. I also find things much
| easier to manipulate in vim when sentences don 't span lines.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I mean, I'm happy that this was not a yet another
| sysadmin/programmer-as-writer justification (adjusting one's
| whole workflow based on the handful of terminal programs that
| one uses).
|
| EDIT: Meaning that I think this kind of justification is more
| interesting since it is meant to affect the process of writing
| itself.
| michaelmior wrote:
| I won't say I'm not guilty of that too sometimes. Although I
| don't think it's so bad. If there's a tool that you really
| like using that can be adapted to work in a variety of
| scenarios, I can understand the justification. For some of
| the things I do, there probably are better tools for the job,
| but if I can make use of existing tools I already know how to
| use well, even if in a suboptimal way, that might be more
| worthwhile to me than investing in learning something new.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Yep, indeed. Whatever works.
| ketzu wrote:
| > diffs make way more sense when there is only one sentence per
| line
|
| I did the same thing for some time for papers at university for
| the same reason. It used to annoy me, because I hate to change
| for my tools, I rather have my tools support my workflow: There
| should be a nicer diff for that.
| fragmede wrote:
| There is! If you're using Git, you can do _git diff --word-
| diff_ to enable word mode, which is computationally more
| expensive, but computing power is cheap these days. There 's
| also an "ignore whitespace" mode ( _-w_ ), though that
| doesn't play well with Python.
| [deleted]
| irq-1 wrote:
| Cool! An example:
|
| You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.
| You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different.
| You are in a little maze of twisting passages, all
| different.
|
| You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.
| You are in a[-little-] maze of twisty {+little+} passages,
| all different. You are in a[-little-] maze of
| [-twisting-]{+twisty little+} passages, all different.
|
| You are in a {+little+} maze of twisty[-little-] passages,
| all different. You are in a little maze of twisty passages,
| all different. You are in a little maze of
| [-twisting-]{+twisty+} passages, all different.
|
| You are in a {+little+} maze of [-twisty
| little-]{+twisting+} passages, all different. You are in a
| little maze of [-twisty-]{+twisting+} passages, all
| different. You are in a little maze of twisting passages,
| all different.
| m4lvin wrote:
| git diff --word-diff
| [deleted]
| TheFreim wrote:
| You could write a script which replaces the end of sentences
| with a new line and use git hooks[0] to run it before every
| commit. You wouldn't have to write any differently.
|
| 0. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks
| michaelmior wrote:
| This would require accurately detecting the end of the
| sentence which is not an easy thing to do correctly
| consistently.
| [deleted]
| dubya wrote:
| Two spaces between sentences makes this easy, and should
| be just as easy a habit as one sentence per line.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I used to write like that (even though I'm not an
| American or a former typewriter) but pressing double
| space got annoying after a while. :-)
| kadoban wrote:
| That's about as unnatural for most people as newline per
| sentence, and has the added risk that you'll accidentally
| publish like that and it'll look weird. One per line
| would be _much_ harder to accidentally publish because
| it's more obvious.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Two spaces between sentences is how I've always typed
| them, even if it's in HTML or MD or other forms that will
| condense them into a single space in the final render.
| The two spaces mark a clear intent to end a sentence
| instead of a period to punctuate an abbreviation.
| TheFreim wrote:
| Many people learned to add two spaces to the end of each
| sentence which is now built in to their muscle memory. My
| father learned to type adding two spaces to the end of
| every sentence, they tried to teach that to me in
| computer class in middle school but since I had a lot of
| experience typing already without it I never felt
| motivated to change my habit to add two spaces. I never
| really saw the point, in most formats I can't see the two
| spaces.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Good typography seems to dictate a wider space after a
| sentence than between words. So this is a typewriter
| habit to mimic that kind of thing (like the sibling
| noted).
| jhardy54 wrote:
| Some people might prefer two spaces, but my understanding
| is that all authorities on "good typography" have
| standardized on one space:
|
| https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-
| sentences....
| yellowapple wrote:
| Those authorities on "good typography" are wrong. They
| prioritize text looking pretty over text conveying
| information clearly and accurately, and the world is
| worse off because of it. Two spaces as the sentence
| delimiter is superior in every way that actually matters,
| and I will die on that hill.
| harshreality wrote:
| Rendering engines can do anything they want. The question
| is about _source representation_ only, for semantic
| purposes. That has nothing to do with _output_
| representation. Even practicaltypography completely
| misses that distinction.
|
| You wouldn't publish anything with line breaks between
| sentences either. Double spacing or line breaks both work
| nicely for semantic purposes because html (or markdown
| which almost always ends up displayed somewhere as html)
| will ignore it.
|
| Any print publishing software in the 21st century should
| be aware that two spaces in a prose text source is a hint
| for a sentence break, and treat it appropriately. They
| often apply custom spacing (slightly more than 1, but
| nowhere close to 2) between sentences anyway. Without the
| two spaces, they have to algorithmically guess at
| sentences. You just won't notice when there are sentence
| detection errors, unless you're a typography fanatic;
| who's going to notice 1 space instead of 1.2 or whatever
| the optimum happens to be?
| sam_bristow wrote:
| Maybe I'm just being slow this morning, but isn't the
| fullstop the indication of the end of the sentence?
|
| What extra information is encoded by fullstop + 2 spaces?
| andreareina wrote:
| The period also indicates the previous word was
| abbreviated, or can be used in an ellipsis, probably
| other situations that aren't top of mind right now.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Interesting. I definitely respect Butterick's opinions on
| typography.
| dubya wrote:
| For me it's a holdover from a high school typing class,
| but I find it useful. I mostly write in LaTeX which just
| ignores the extras. On the iphone, two spaces are
| replaced by a period and a space, which is quite handy.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Two spaces after each sentence comes from typewriters,
| where it supposedly looked better. On computers it made
| sense in the time of monospaced fonts, but with "modern"
| fonts being able to control the amount of space behind
| punctuation it's largely redundant.
| blowski wrote:
| Except for when you want to do diffs at the end of a
| sentence.
| kadoban wrote:
| Yeah I believe this is a generational thing. I learned
| double-space as well, but pretty sure not long after me
| they stopped teaching that, and I've totally stopped
| doing it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Double spaces was the norm on (almost always monospaced
| font) typewriters [EDIT: in English]. I assume it
| lingered on computers until sometime in the 80s but was
| shifting especially once proportional fonts for written
| material (other than things like code of course) became
| the norm.
|
| I couldn't tell you when I switched.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Double spaces was the norm for English. I understand it
| is considered mostly obsolete nowadays.
|
| It has not been the norm for German ever.
|
| Edit: Related discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22975299
| earth_walker wrote:
| I was taught to use double spaces in highschool typing
| class (we used electric typewriters with the buffer off).
| In the ~35 years since I have only ever met a handful of
| people, all older than me, who did it in practice.
|
| I continued through university while using a computer to
| type things up, I'm pretty sure my thesis had double
| spaces after periods, written in WP. Once I graduated I
| dropped it pretty quickly.
|
| Was there an early version of Word's spell-check-on-the-
| fly that underlined double spaces, or am I miss-
| remembering?
| ghaff wrote:
| >Was there an early version of Word's spell-check-on-the-
| fly that underlined double spaces, or am I miss-
| remembering?
|
| I don't remember that and I was a fairly early user of
| Word going back to DOS days although I rarely use it any
| longer.
| earth_walker wrote:
| Apparently you could set up one or two spaces depending
| on your preference, however recent versions of Word now
| mark double spaces as an error by default.
| euroderf wrote:
| I've seen two spaces listed as a "resume don't-do" cos it
| marks you as an oldster.
| yellowapple wrote:
| My resume is in LaTeX, so they literally would never
| know.
| arathore wrote:
| Exactly, I mostly write in Latex and one-sentence-per-line
| makes so much sense for that.
| pointlessone wrote:
| Vim has built-in text object for sentences. It supports
| sentences spanning multiple lines.
| michaelmior wrote:
| Yes, but I still find it more convenient to have sentences on
| their own line. Vim's sentence text object does also not
| always correspond correctly to actual sentences.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Yeah, same here. If you're going to have any text commited to
| git, it'll work much better if it's one sentence per line. Not
| that git is great for prose, but it kinda does the job and I
| don't need to have a new tool. Hammers, nails.
| kadoban wrote:
| > Not that git is great for prose, but it kinda does the job
| and I don't need to have a new tool.
|
| Is there really something better? Git is pretty great in
| general, and prose doesn't seem like there'd be much room for
| improvement in tooling. I'm not a writer really though, so
| maybe I'm missing something?
| ghaff wrote:
| At least with a controlled circle of people who respect
| that, say, handing off a doc to an editor means they
| shouldn't make inline changes any longer, collaborative doc
| editing like Google Docs.
|
| As the above implies, you don't have great version control
| and some of the process management is manual. But it works
| well for people accustomed to working that way and it's
| much more familiar for people who don't regularly use git
| (or use it at all).
| bertil wrote:
| I remember struggling to write essays when I was in highschool.
| Well, _I_ was fine, but my teachers insisted it was long-winded
| gibberish. Concerned, my grand'mother told me: "Ask Sonia" I knew
| she was her friend, and they liked to argue a lot, but I was a
| bit confused by the advice.
|
| It turns out, editing was Sonia's job: she was the head reader at
| a very prestigious publishing house, meaning she was giving notes
| and feedback to very famous authors, including four Nobel Prize
| laureates. You kind of have to know what you are doing when you
| are sending a manuscript full of red in the margins and the
| person can respond "I've got a Nobel Prize and you don't." She
| definitely had the icey stare to match.
|
| Oddly, her advice was incredibly simple, and fitted in two very
| short pieces:
|
| * Subject, Verb, Complement -- in that order. If you see two
| verbs, but a period between them.
|
| * Things are confusing if you don't put them in order: start by
| the beginning, find the widest piece of context that explain the
| rest.
|
| I don't apply her rules every time, but for every technical
| document, every time I've tried, it's been night and day.
|
| That typographic argument is really resonating with me.
| drivers99 wrote:
| > find the widest piece of context that explain the rest.
|
| Sounds interesting. Can you explain this?
| bertil wrote:
| French, especially academic writing, can have a lot of
| subordinate clauses:
|
| > I asked the person _who_ was standing there.
|
| It has even more oratory precautions:
|
| > We can argue that this result, that was seemingly proven
| wrong by a previous analysis, appear to be a consequence of a
| previous attempt that was investigated by my esteemed
| colleagues, who have looked into the author and found out
| that they ...
|
| If you want to split between each verb as they are, you end
| up with sentences that are in the wrong order:
|
| > I asked a person. That person was standing there.
|
| > We can argue that this result appear to be a consequence of
| a previous attempt. This result was seemingly proven wrong by
| a previous analysis. The attempt was investigated by my
| esteemed colleagues. My colleagues have looked into the
| author. They found out that the author...
|
| So you are better off by thinking: what comes first? The
| person was standing there _before_ I asked, and I asked them
| because they were standing, so that information should come
| first:
|
| > A person was standing there. I asked them.
|
| Further, most actions in a chain of preposition explain a
| decision: those should come first.
|
| > This result was surprising. Sceptics wanted to verify it.
| Their investigation concluded that the result was wrong. My
| colleagues wanted to know more. They investigated the authors
| of the result. They found out...
|
| The outcome is a bit drier. The benefit is that if one
| sentence is longer, or an adjective inverted, or a complement
| put at the begining of the sentence, it's more striking. That
| helps attracting attention to what matters, selectively.
|
| For academic writing, you don't need as many oratory
| precautions because you can report other findings without
| having to validate them as yours: you present them all as
| facts on equal footing. If you agree, it's implied from the
| lack of criticism. If you disagree, it's on you to prove why
| _after_ presenting the work fairly. For that, you have to
| include the key aspect to support you criticism in your first
| presentation.
|
| I can also give the impression that you are just moving
| forward without a clear goal: "This happened, in particular
| then this happened, then this reacted..." which is why you
| want to summarise your point early: people will see the
| arguement getting closer to its goal, knowing what that goal
| is.
| throwawayHN378 wrote:
| Been doing this forever but not for a particular reaso.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I always do this for markdown, makes it waaay easier to edit,
| reason about, cut, etc.
| elfrinjo wrote:
| I completely agree. Using one line per sentence (and soemtime
| more lines when the sentence is longer) makes it way easier to
| structure the text. Markdown and are perfectly able to fit the
| text to the device you are reading on. It also makes version
| control and diffs more usable.
|
| However, I can also agree that this style might be not suitable
| for non-technical writing.
| trasz wrote:
| This is how man pages are written, and in the long run it's
| really convenient. I'm guessing that's also why it recently
| become the rule for FreeBSD documentation, after migrating from
| DocBook to AsciiDoc.
| bronikowski wrote:
| As a fan of Proust I feel he already did that but not in the way
| Derek intended.
|
| It's more like "One sentence per page(s) --
| https://nathanbrixius.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/the-five-long...
| generalpf wrote:
| Is this what inspires LinkedIn engagement hackers?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| If you've ever had LaTeX docs in version control, you'll quickly
| appreciate this approach as well, since VCS is much more sane
| when dealing with lines.
| edpichler wrote:
| It is an advice for Internet only, right?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Is this why HN joins consecutive lines? This is on line 2.
|
| And this is on line 4.
| wccrawford wrote:
| No, that's just how markdown works, and HN uses markdown.
| an_ko wrote:
| HN does not use Markdown. Compare HN formatting options
| https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc to Markdown
| https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
| wccrawford wrote:
| I'll concede that.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| I write this way in Asciidoc, with a single line break between
| sentences and two line breaks between paragraphs, since it
| automatically compiles into normal paragraphs when I generate
| PDFs or Word documents. It makes editing so much easier.
| cjsawyer wrote:
| I love the irony of using a two sentence opening paragraph to
| sing the praises of not using paragraphs.
|
| Good advice though ;)
| dandare wrote:
| Maybe this is the right thread to ask for help:
|
| I am looking for resources on the technical aspects of creative
| writing. Like this post. Or as mentioned below, on using semantic
| line breaks https://sembr.org/
|
| I am trying to improve my creative writing style but most what I
| find on Google is about the creative aspect and not about the
| technical aspect.
| Disruptive_Dave wrote:
| This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word
| sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous.
| Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The
| sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands
| some variety.
|
| Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music.
| Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a
| harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium
| length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I
| will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a
| sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus
| of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals-
| sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
|
| So I write with a combination of short, medium, and long
| sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader's ear. Don't
| just write words. Write music.
|
| (Gary Provost)
| jstummbillig wrote:
| That's beautiful.
|
| To be fair, and are we not all about being fair around here, he
| explicitly states:
|
| > Not publishing one sentence per line, no. _Write like this
| for your eyes only._
|
| On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that there should
| be no spillage between how you write and how you publish. For
| example, I found "How to live" unreadable partly because of
| what I suspect this style of writing did to the published
| product.
| pgcj_poster wrote:
| I tend to write prose source code
|
| with line breaks after grammatical units.
|
| I've noticed that since I started doing so,
|
| I've been writing longer paragraphs and sentences,
|
| since the line breaks in the source do for me
|
| what paragraph and sentence breaks do for the reader.
|
| It's something I have to pay attention to.
| kadoban wrote:
| Writing like this works really well for vim and git as
| well. It makes it easy to delete/move/edit lines (eg with:
| d2j), and then in git the diffs are by default formatted
| nicely and contain only sentences.
|
| Though if you wanted to get fancy you could use other vim
| movement commands (yank the next 2 sentences), I still
| think it's easier using lines.
| SamBam wrote:
| GP was echoing the article's point that writing one sentence
| per line lets you notice, and vary, your line lengths.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Ah. If that's the case (and I can see how it might be) I
| misunderstood. Thanks.
| [deleted]
| xwowsersx wrote:
| My favorite excerpt from that book!
| HKH2 wrote:
| Five word sentences are fine. The first paragraph is not; the
| content itself is dull. Do it with useful sentences.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Of course. Hence
|
| > But several together become monotonous.
| joedavison wrote:
| The semicolon is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that
| sentence. That makes your example 5-10-5 words instead of
| 5-5-5-5. Try using a period instead of semicolon and hear how
| it sounds.
| HKH2 wrote:
| What difference does it make? They are multiples of five.
| Are they okay to him? I doubt that is so. He dislikes
| chunks of five. He was not prescribing semicolons. That
| would still bother him.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| I think you might be missing the forest for the trees,
| here. It's not about five-word sentences; it's about the
| repetition making the paragraph as a whole monotonous and
| robotic - something you demonstrated very well in this
| very comment.
| [deleted]
| pagutierrezn wrote:
| "We need to vary the lengths of our sentences. Sometimes short.
| Sometimes long."
| Ensorceled wrote:
| The comment was a "yes, and" not a "no, but"
| eesmith wrote:
| Yes, and the hyperlink for "vary the lengths of our
| sentences" in the linked-to essay goes to another essay, by
| the same author - https://sive.rs/book/WritingTools - which
| includes that Gary Provost "tour de force".
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| I'm gonna be honest, my mind got bored in the long sentence and
| completely skipped like half the words. I think I'm just too
| used to reading documentation and skipping 50% of the words so
| I can see how to do something quicker.
| OneLessThing wrote:
| I had the same experience when my brain decided that I get
| the point of the sentence and where it was going. Perhaps if
| there was actual content in the sentence this wouldn't have
| happened.
| andruc wrote:
| I wouldn't recommend consuming art like we do documentation.
| gnulinux wrote:
| I remember reading this as a child (maybe in elementary school)
| and it affecting my writing. I have to admit, especially when
| writing something technical, forgetting about this and focusing
| on making small, easily-understandable sentences can help the
| reader. (even though it's more boring)
| wongarsu wrote:
| A paragraph with just one 50-word sentence doesn't have
| varied sentence length either ;)
|
| For technical writing, "no more than one thought per
| sentence" works quite well in my opinion. Or at least it's a
| good guideline to apply in the first pass of proofreading.
| andai wrote:
| I agree with no more than one thought per sentence in
| general, though I have the opposite problem: it often takes
| me several paragraphs to get a single thought across. So
| the end result ends up being something like 0.1 thoughts
| per sentence.
|
| I guess what I'm trying to get across is not a single
| thought but a _perspective_ which requires some background
| and context to appreciate, and I struggle with separating
| out the essential from the incidental, and structuring it
| for maximum engagement.
| cseleborg wrote:
| I struggle with this, too. I'm just very verbose. I try
| to keep this piece of advice about working to shorten a
| text in mind: it's done, not when there is nothing more
| to add, but when nothing more can be removed. (Saint-
| Exupery, I believe). It helps me a little bit.
| andai wrote:
| "Forgive me this long letter--I had not the time to make
| it short."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Technical text has an excuse to be boring and repetitive. The
| content is king, clarity and lack of ambiguity are the next
| most important things, and style is just a fourth place
| contender.
|
| EDIT: I just want to point that differently from this thread,
| the article is not about text style.
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| Reading this makes me angry at all my school teachers for the
| subjects of [my-native-language] and writing.
|
| It is such a simple technique, that makes such a huge impact on
| ones writing, and yet no teacher bothered to teach it. I spent
| all my school years writing monotonous essays of five-word
| sentences. Week after week I would make another one, and I
| could clearly see for myself that they were bad, I just
| couldn't tell why. So when I asked my teachers for help, asking
| "what is wrong with my writing?", "what am I missing?", all I
| ever got back was a bad grade and the same useless tip: "just
| read more".
|
| They might just as well have said to "draw the rest of the
| fucking owl."
| swyx wrote:
| as they say: those who can't do, teach
| bombcar wrote:
| That is five words long.
| yellowapple wrote:
| So is that, my friend.
| alar44 wrote:
| They = idiots
| coliveira wrote:
| This is a problem with most advice on English writing. They
| only teach you how to write as at a level that a 8 years old
| reader would understand. Most modern books, fiction or not,
| are written at a juvenile level, at the formal request of
| publishers. As a result, the level of reading and
| comprehension for most people has decreased to a level that
| is lower than in any other literate society.
| JoshCole wrote:
| > they only teach you how to write as at a level that a 8
| years old reader would understand.
|
| Many if not most modern writing advice will remind you to
| focus on your audience. Most audiences aren't composed of
| eight year olds. So it isn't true that most advice suggests
| writing for eight year olds.
|
| > As a result, the level of reading and comprehension for
| most people has decreased to a level that is lower than in
| any other literate society.
|
| We track statistics like reading comprehension and you can
| look them up. I did. The source I found showed that every
| state in the US I checked - with the exception of Michigan
| (??) - has reading comprehension improve relative to the
| year 2003. In some cases this improvement is by a notable
| amount, in some cases not so notable.
|
| It seems unlikely to me that people now are worse at
| reading and writing than people used to be. Writing is more
| common now and reading is more common too. Once,
| journalists wrote. Now everyone does.
| ghaff wrote:
| >So it isn't true that most advice suggests writing for
| eight year olds.
|
| That may be true although I can tell you from personal
| experience that writing optimizers for places like trade
| press sites absolutely push you towards more basic
| language, shorter sentences, etc. One site in particular
| I used to write for sometimes told me every single time
| that I should basically dumb down my prose. And I don't
| write in a particularly literary way and I've pretty much
| never had this feedback from human editors.
|
| >Once, journalists wrote. Now everyone does.
|
| Interesting observation. At one point, most business
| people above a certain level were "writing" by dictating
| to their secretaries which is a completely different mode
| of getting information onto a page.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I think you're both making good points in this thread.
| I'm writing a non-fiction book in my spare time, and I've
| had to face the fact that my default get-words-on-the-
| page is _extremely_ flowery.
|
| Would it be possible for you share an example of your
| prose that received this criticism?
| JoshCole wrote:
| I believe you. Medium is the message is a term from media
| theory. It refers to the idea that messages aren't in a
| vacuum, but are shaped by where they are transmitted.
| Often that shape is a function of what the audience will
| find appealing. You can tie this sort of thing to bellman
| equations to get a mathematical grip on the effect.
|
| It does exist. It can be as harmful as you think it is.
| Yet it isn't harmful everywhere - isn't the world at
| large without any variation. It is intimately tied to the
| environment you are in, because that environment produces
| the rewards. Different environment, different reward,
| different impact on your writing. The effect is local,
| not global.
|
| Which means you get to have a superpower.
|
| When you have a bad transformation that degrades thinking
| that makes the term "medium is the message" feel
| dangerous. So you get things like Neil Postman's Amusing
| Ourselves to Death. I think your post is an example of
| the same type of fear. This focus - on the examples of
| times where things are negative - it misses the
| opportunity. Since messages are a function not of raw
| ideas, but of their audiences you have an incredible
| power. Choose the right audience. Set the expectation for
| evaluation in advance. Pick the medium that helps you to
| think clearly and makes it easy to be judged. Now,
| instead of being destroyed by your incentive environment,
| you get empowered by it.
|
| Take a look at Amazon's writing culture for an example of
| that. Or more broadly, the many companies which chose to
| ban powerpoint for reasons which are fundamentally
| related to what I'm talking about. We're not worse at
| understanding writing than ever before. We're more
| advanced than ever before, because we stand atop the
| giants that came before us. Yet at the same time - we're
| not, because that too is local and not global. The future
| is often already here, but isn't evenly distributed.
| t-3 wrote:
| Reading more _is_ the best way to learn though. Having good
| examples to imitate and build off of make writing clear,
| engaging prose much easier. When my math teachers told me
| "just do the practice problems", I also thought they were
| idiots, but they were actually right...
| latexr wrote:
| > Reading more _is_ the best way to learn though.
|
| It's useless advice to a student asking for specific help.
| A cooking student asking "why is my rice always soggy"
| should hear "let's start by examining how much water you're
| using", not "watch more cooking shows until you understand
| through osmosis".
|
| The point of a teacher is to teach. If the only guidance
| they can muster is "consume more of what you're trying to
| create", there's no point to having a class.
| misterprime wrote:
| Yes, not everyone can notice the important element of
| what they're witnessing, especially not a novice.
|
| I've seen a lot of baseball and golf, and I still don't
| know how to even try to swing those things properly.
| Disruptive_Dave wrote:
| Reading as a reader is kinda different than reading as a
| writer. Different mind states. As a reader I'm getting lost
| in a story, not picking up on writing styles and patterns.
| You're not wrong. Just need the caveat of reading with the
| intention (or partial intention) to pull yourself out of
| the story and check out the architecture.
| awestroke wrote:
| Reading more is good, but what if the teacher had pointed
| out the sentence length and told the student to start
| reflecting on sentence length while reading?
| strgcmc wrote:
| Outside of classroom-style dedicated instruction, this
| really does seem to be the best form of learning, i.e. a
| semi-active/not-fully-passive approach.
|
| There is generally no "hack" that the student can use to
| avoid having to read a lot of stuff, in order to learn
| and especially to become an expert. What a student needs
| to read, isn't necessarily textbooks or the traditional
| orthodoxy of materials, but still there is undoubtedly a
| lot of reading that must be done, to "get good" as they
| say.
|
| That being said, for a teacher to GUIDE that reading, to
| give some hints, pointers, themes, interconnections,
| sequencing (start with X, then read Y to deepen your
| knowledge of X), etc., is absolutely invaluable.
|
| To me, this seems like the Pareto-optimal 80/20
| breakdown, where 20% of the teacher's investment in time
| and energy can get you 80% of the benefit of having
| teaching at all (i.e. don't need a full curriculum or
| full-time commitment to dedicated instruction, but do
| need to spend some time/energy pointing the student in
| various directions and giving them some ideas to think
| about while reading).
| Qub3d wrote:
| This is all brushing up against the central theme of "Zen
| and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which approaches
| its core thesis by dissecting the process of teaching
| college students how to "write Quality".
| Zababa wrote:
| > When my math teachers told me "just do the practice
| problems", I also thought they were idiots, but they were
| actually right...
|
| Reading more would be reading problems. Doing practice
| problems is equivalent to writing and having
| someone/something point out if it's good or not.
| blobbers wrote:
| Some people are going to respond "reading more is the right
| thing to do".
|
| As in: practice makes perfect. Observing a master, will make
| you a master.
|
| But unless your eye or brain can detect what they're doing,
| it can feel hopeless.
|
| Sometimes having it broken out like this really helps. I
| found this amazing too!
|
| So really, perfect practice makes perfect. Or at least saves
| time and avoids forming bad habits along the way.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| I'm curious, what language/country was that?
| exysle wrote:
| He is not saying short sentences are necessary, he is saying
| that each sentence stands out with a newline, which means they
| can be judged at an individual level.
| rsfern wrote:
| The authors second point is that the length of each sentence
| also stands out. This helps you assess the flow of the
| writing.
|
| I thought it was a useful point because I write with one line
| per sentence, but had only considered the first advantage.
| paulpauper wrote:
| it makes no difference tbh how varied the sentence length is or
| other aesthetic factors. nothing is reliably been shown to make
| writing more successful.
| jalino23 wrote:
| Where can I read more of this kind of musicly writing? It was
| so satisfying to read! I truly enjoyed it like no other reading
| I've experience before
| keithalewis wrote:
| I can highly recommend "The Heavenly City of the 18-th
| Century Philosophers" by Carl Becker.
| auxbuss wrote:
| Sebastian Barry is a master. Try Days Without End.
|
| Quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/50666270-days-
| without-...
|
| The criminally unknown Janni Howker borders on poetry in her
| prose. Try Martin Farrell.
| soheil wrote:
| > The writing is getting boring.
|
| What is this obsession with writing not being boring? If you're
| reading the passphrase to disarm a nuclear missile do you think
| you might get bored halfway if the sentences are too long?
|
| I never understood why people insist on having short sentences.
| Human thought does not come in a small pre-packaged short
| sentence form. Some of the best philosophers wrote very long
| sentences, look at Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant. Let's not
| dumb ourselves down by sacrificing rich, deep thoughts just
| because our ADHD might kick in and we might get distracted by
| the next YouTube cat video.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > What is this obsession with writing not being boring?
|
| This may come as a surprise, but sometimes a piece of writing
| is not technical documentation.
| novalis78 wrote:
| The most fascinating experience is trying to understand
| Schopenhauer in German and then reading the same paragraph in
| an English translation. It feels pre-digested or narrowed down
| to one possible interpretation.
|
| A professor at college tried to hone into us the short-precise
| nature of English as a cultural phenomenon and considered the
| paragraph long highly artistic German texts a reflection of a
| culture that felt the need to impress.
|
| Still to this day, I admire both: the sophisticated elaborate
| construction of long flowery sentences that strain your memory
| as well as the ultra-concise that brilliantly clear short
| (often technical) prose.
| [deleted]
| who-shot-jr wrote:
| This is my sentence.
|
| There are many like it, but this one is mine.
| wnoise wrote:
| Many comments have mentioned both the benefits to diffing, and
| various --word-diff options. Unfortunately word-merge tools are
| harder to find. You can of course use smudge/clean filters to
| unwrap and rewrap text, but those are quite fiddly to set up and
| fragile in practice.
|
| It isn't the main point of https://github.com/neilbrown/wiggle ,
| but it can actually diff and merge on a word basis. A git merge
| driver is fairly easy to set up.
| mic47 wrote:
| And it makes git diff pretty.
| nazzacodes wrote:
| *more functional
| gist wrote:
| > My advice to anyone who writes: Try writing one sentence per
| line. I've been doing it for twenty years, and it improved my
| writing more than anything else.
|
| Who is the judge of 'it improved my writing more than anything
| else'? What was the 'anything else' for that matter.
|
| This is a particular writing style just like Aaron Sorkin has a
| particular style. Some people like that style to others it's
| annoying.
|
| https://thescriptlab.com/features/10569-5-secrets-to-aaron-s...
|
| > We sometimes write sentences that don't need to exist. Hidden
| in a paragraph, we might not notice. Standing on their own, we
| notice. Delete any sentence not worthy of its own line.
|
| If you proofread and review what you write why would you not
| notice?
| pessimizer wrote:
| This isn't suggesting that the things that you publish be one
| sentence per line. It's suggesting that you write one sentence
| per line, polish the individual sentences (and question their
| right to exist at all) then edit them into paragraphs. You
| might have assumed this assume this by noticing the fact that
| the article has more than one sentence per line.
|
| > Who is the judge of 'it improved my writing more than
| anything else'?
|
| Who do you think? Who wrote the article? The word 'my' might be
| a hint.
|
| > What was the 'anything else' for that matter.
|
| Would you give him permission to describe _one_ practice he
| adopted while writing without describing every single step he
| 's made in learning how to write since he was a child?
| gist wrote:
| > Who do you think? Who wrote the article? The word 'my'
| might be a hint.
|
| I am challenging how someone arrives at that conclusion if
| they are the judge (which seems implied). Sivers gives
| nothing at all to indicate - not even anecdotes - as backup
| for the improvement. His statement is general and broad.
|
| Let's say he was instead describing writing he did for school
| or for work. So before he applied his technique he was rated
| or judged a certain way (grades, reviews). Then he started to
| use the technique he describes. He then gets better grades or
| reviews. In that case he concludes 'it improved my writing
| more than anything else' (and I might still ask 'what are the
| other things you tried that did not work'. But in this case
| all he says (again) is a very broad and not in any way backed
| up 'it improved my writing'. And he claims 'advice to anyone
| who writes' he can't be serious using 'anyone' in that
| 'polished' sentence other than to get people worked up over a
| blog post and talking about it (which to be clear is a
| technique that bloggers use)
|
| > Would you give him permission to describe one practice he
| adopted while writing without describing every single step
| he's made in learning how to write since he was a child?
|
| People read what others have written and critique. My guess
| is that if he read my comment he might think that someone
| thought a certain thing and wonder and then maybe he would
| learn and/or make an adjustment. Not the reason I made my
| comment but there is nothing that indicates he should not be
| criticized or that others can't learn from the statements
| that I made whether they agree or not with what I said.
|
| > It's suggesting that you write one sentence per line,
| polish the individual sentences
|
| Again he is not even indicating when his technique matters. I
| write every day (for sales) I get very good results (judged
| by replies and results). In my case I don't have to polish
| every sentence I write enough and have enough feedback that I
| find that sometimes you don't even want to care that much
| because that in itself (in certain situations) telegraphs
| something.
|
| You don't think starting a post with this is a bit to broad:
|
| "My advice to anyone who writes: Try writing one sentence per
| line."
|
| Seems very clear to me 'advice to anyone who writes'
| seriously 'anyone'?
| stewfortier wrote:
| I think the spirit of this advice translates well to publishing
| style, too.
|
| I get intimidated when I see big blocks of text.
|
| But take that same, intimidating block and thoughtfully break it
| into short, punchier paragraphs and I'm in.
|
| Shorter paragraphs make it easier for me to skim and get a sense
| of where something is going. They also give me more chances to
| pause, catch my breath, and internalize what I'm reading.
|
| This is harder for me to do in a big block of text where I'm
| afraid I'll lose my place if I divert my attention.
| gjvc wrote:
| just don't take this as "one sentence per paragraph" unless you
| want to sound like a used-car salesman.
| oever wrote:
| It's like poetry.
| nunez wrote:
| this is actually really good advice. shorter paragraphs force you
| to be concise, and concise is really good in short-attention-span
| mediums like reddit or email.
| AndyJado wrote:
| Here is an app takes one line as first class citizen.
|
| it records the time you spend on each line.
|
| it feels like writing on paper, but more efficient if you dealing
| with lines.
|
| https://github.com/AndyJado/Boya
| elchin wrote:
| LaTeX does the same as Markdown and HTML - I used to do this when
| I was in academia.
| wheybags wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but a pet peeve of mine is how you don't get
| a real line break in markdown when you insert a newline. Sometime
| I want a line break without a vertical apace for a new paragraph,
| I can't be the only one here! I know I can normally just add a br
| tag, but that looks nasty when you read it as plain text.
| capableweb wrote:
| That depends on the markdown implementation (like so many
| features). But most of them implement "two trailing spaces on
| previous line force line-break" so you can (in most places) do
| something like this: This is a paragraph with
| no linebreaks. This is a paragraph with
| one linebreak but without trailing spaces This
| is a paragraph with one line break and trailing
| spaces on previous line
|
| That will render correctly on GitHub and other places (meaning,
| when rendered, the first one has no line-breaks, the second one
| has no line-breaks but the third one does [select the full
| third example to see the trailing spaces])
|
| Here is a demo of it in action: https://jbt.github.io/markdown-
| editor/#dY3RCYAwDET/M8VN4DQuE...
| Beltalowda wrote:
| The two spaces-is-linebreak thing is in the commonmark
| specification, and has been a Markdown feature from the first
| Gruber Perl script, so it should be pretty compatible.
|
| The problem with it is that it's so "invisible" and that some
| editors/people have things setup to strip trailing whitespace
| by default.
|
| I wish there was a simpler way, like "@ at the end of a line
| indicates a hard line break", but at well.
| xigoi wrote:
| Significant trailing whitespace is awful. Many editors have
| it invisible and/or automatically remove it.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| Markdown allows you to inline HTML, so just use the <BR> tag
| for a newline.
|
| Edit: Oh come now... Editing your post to also say what I
| replied, then voting me down is poor sportsmanship old chap.
| wheybags wrote:
| I wrote that bit about br tags before seeing any replies,
| sorry :p My sportsmanship is immaculate!
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| You can't downvote direct replies; Only upvote. Meaning any
| downvotes you've received were from others.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| good point! (I knew that, honest)
| lo5 wrote:
| Related: Cormac McCarthy's tips on how to write a great science
| paper[1]
|
| > Limit each paragraph to a single message. A single sentence can
| be a paragraph. [...] > Keep sentences short, simply constructed
| and direct. [...]
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02918-5
| aasasd wrote:
| Such, errr, 'giants' as BBC evidently already adhere to this
| advice, and others follow in their step.
|
| Though I suspect that the motivation is different.
| Angostura wrote:
| No. Their paragraphs rarely extend beyond two sentences in news
| reports https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61859881 but it
| does happen.
| honksillet wrote:
| I was going to say this. New reporting has denigrated to two
| sentence paragraphs. It is ridiculous.
| aasasd wrote:
| > _denigrated_
|
| I don't think that's the word you're looking for =)
|
| (Since we're on the topic of words in this thread.)
| btrettel wrote:
| Some previous discussion of this writing/coding style (though not
| of this particular page, which didn't go online until today):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31695393
|
| https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642395
|
| http://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/writings/2015-05-13better-writing-...
| globular-toast wrote:
| This is not a bad idea. Any decent toolchain will support
| rendering as paragraphs, including LaTeX. Another advantage not
| stated is version control and diffs work much better. You do have
| to put up with long lines, but most editors support wrapping long
| lines for display purposes.
|
| I wish I had done this while writing my PhD thesis.
| mjcohen wrote:
| The mathematician Lillian R. Lieber wrote a number of expository
| books in which the text had one phrase per line. I found this
| extremely easy to read, and I write my LaTex this way, which
| makes it very easy to edit.
|
| Here is what the previous paragraph would look like in her style:
|
| The mathematician Lillian R. Lieber
|
| wrote a number of expository books
|
| in which the text had one phrase per line.
|
| I found this extremely easy to read,
|
| and I write my LaTex this way,
|
| which makes it very easy to edit.
|
| I highly recommend the wikipedia article about her and its
| references:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Rosanoff_Lieber#Unusua...
| dws wrote:
| Elsewhere, https://sive.rs/book/ShortSentences, Sivers recommends
| "Several Short Sentences About Writing", which is a perspective
| on writing that I'd not seen before. A useful read if you want to
| practice his present advice.
| erellsworth wrote:
| Tangentially related:
|
| "Omit needless words."
|
| -William Strunk, The Elements of Style
|
| Highly recommended book for anyone who wants to be a more
| effective writer.
| eesmith wrote:
| Have you read any of the criticism of the book? Its Wikipedia
| entry quotes Pullum:
|
| > The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal
| eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in
| English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors
| appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own
| rules ... It's sad. Several generations of college students
| learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk
| and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who
| know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write
| however or than me or was or which, but can't tell you why.
|
| (See also "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" at, eg,
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-file-manager/fil...
| . Language Log recommends
| https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Strunk+site%3Ahttp%3A%...
| as a way to find further criticism from them.)
|
| For "Omit needless words", a problem is identifying what
| "needless" means. Quoting http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langua
| gelog/archives/004552.h...:
|
| > Whenever you see an appeal to ONW, you should wonder what
| people are doing with those "needless" words. Most of the time,
| those extra words are serving some function that conflicts with
| brevity; they're doing some work.
|
| There are also examples how that phrase (likely) caused people
| to believe that if a word _can_ be omitted then in _must_ be
| ommitted, like
| http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004176.h...
| and
| http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000994.h...
| .
|
| Or how in White's own writings he "sometimes throws in a few
| extra words just for the sheer resonant fun of it" -
| http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001904.h...
| .
|
| FWIW, I think "don't be too wordy" is more accurate and less
| likely to be misunderstood than "omit needless words", and one
| character shorter.
|
| (Personally, I still recall my utter confusion in 11th grade
| English trying to figure what "passive" meant when told to
| avoid it. Turns out three of the four examples of passive in
| "The Elements of Style" ... aren't passive! And yes, I got
| marked off for using what may- or may-not have been the
| passive.)
| supersrdjan wrote:
| Authors of the excellent "Clear and Simple as the Truth:
| Writing Classic Prose," Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner,
| have this to say about Elements of Style:
|
| Strunk and White's disarming treatment of what everybody really
| needs to know about writing has been treasured by generations
| of people who are occasionally forced to write something and
| view the prospect with a sinking feeling of dread. As a guide
| to writing, The Elements of Style, being little more than an
| apparently arbitrary mixture of grammatical digest, handy list
| of common mistakes, and expert hand-holding, is drastically
| incomplete, but it is a masterpiece of psychological insight.
| Its attractions derive, we suspect, first, from its implicit,
| cheery, and optimistic promise that if you just read its few
| pages and work those few surface tricks it teaches you ("In
| summaries, keep to one tense," "less should not be used for
| fewer"), you will not embarrass yourself; second, from its
| exhortatory cheerleading that seems so assured and upbeat; and
| third, from its tone of common sense that masks, at key points,
| an essential vacuousness: "Choose a suitable design and hold to
| it."
|
| Edit: oh and by the way, the two authors recommend this as a
| better alternative (I haven't read it): Style: Toward Clarity
| and Grace, by Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb
| mattbee wrote:
| As a writing manual, I am also a big fan of "First You Write a
| Sentence" by Joe Moran.
| personlurking wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of Jordan Peterson's advice to rewrite every
| sentence until it's the best it can be, and then repeat that with
| each paragraph.
|
| His son recently released Essay, a tool to help write better, in
| the sense mentioned above.
|
| https://essay.app
| hanifc wrote:
| This entire comment was what came to mind as soon as I opened
| the post. Glad I found it here.
|
| His process is outlined here:
| https://medium.com/practicecomesfirst/dr-jordan-b-petersons-...
|
| I believe the app is a tool to help you learn, practice, and
| internalize that process.
| preseinger wrote:
| One sentence per line makes prose feel sanctimonious, even self-
| aggrandizing. I find this dude's writing un-readable for exactly
| this reason. All of his articles are like HTML versions of the
| Ducks Go Quack TED Talk [0]. I just roll my eyes.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s
| kuhzaam wrote:
| In his defense, he is saying to write "one sentence per line"
| only _while_ you are writing/editing. He says this is "for your
| eyes only", and that you'll recombine into paragraphs
| afterwards.
|
| I think the idea is that, if your sentence can stand up to the
| added scrutiny you'll give it while seeing it sitting all
| alone, then it is worth keeping. Otherwise it is a wasteful
| sentence.
|
| Anyway, I do agree that the actual "one sentence per line"
| prose that is so pervasive on places like LinkedIn is awful.
| Semiapies wrote:
| At this point, I think it's wasted breath to try to respond
| to the people who skim over articles without comprehension
| (or who don't appear to read the articles at all) and who
| instead just respond to the title.
| preseinger wrote:
| I understand the difference between one line per sentence
| at the source level, and at the presentation layer. As far
| as I can tell, articles on sivers.org demonstrate both.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I think the advice is still useful for editing. Personally, I'd
| add the extra step of re-consolidating the sentences into
| paragraphs after going through this editing phase though. That
| said, I do a lot of technical writing and I often find
| paragraphs with fewer sentences are my better written
| paragraphs.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'd argue that the job of clumping adjacent sentences
| together into paragraphs is a job for whatever builds/renders
| the writing, not for the writer.
| preseinger wrote:
| (laughs) what??
|
| Paragraphs -- like punctuation, grammar, syncopation, etc.
| etc. -- express semantic intent. They're not, like, type
| faces. They're one of the tools that *authors* use to
| communicate meaning.
| CoryAlexMartin wrote:
| I also find his writing very unnatural and hard to read. It
| makes me seriously doubt his method, which he claims he's been
| using for twenty years.
|
| The first thing that stood out to me was the robotic nature of
| his writing. It seems like he's going so far out of his way to
| remove "unnecessary" words from sentences, and remove
| "unnecessary" sentences from his paragraphs, and to stringently
| vary his sentence lengths, that he winds up writing unnatural
| language. If you write in a way people aren't accustomed to,
| your readers are going to have a harder time understanding you.
|
| "Sometimes short. Sometimes long." "Cut three lines. Paste them
| up above."
|
| This isn't how English is used.
| sequoia wrote:
| I'm surprised no one has mentioned ventilated prose, which is
| like this but even moreso:
| https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/
| nojs wrote:
| > Not publishing one sentence per line, no. Write like this for
| your eyes only.
|
| Many news outlets now use this as standard for publishing.
|
| Random example: every article at https://www.abc.net.au/
|
| I challenge you to find a (non-quote) paragraph with more than
| one sentence!
| II2II wrote:
| However, the intent is different. The author is suggesting a
| general purpose method to facilitate a more engaging writing
| style that can be used even if the product contains paragraphs
| of multiple sentences. News outlets use it to facilitate the
| conveying of information to the reader.
|
| (Incidentally, it is not too hard to find multi-sentence
| paragraphs in news stories, though it is rare to find anything
| exceeding three sentences.)
| pkdpic wrote:
| Ok.
|
| I love it.
|
| This could change everything.
|
| Future historians may thank us.
|
| Seriously.
| mad44 wrote:
| I had copied this Emacs macro just for doing that.
|
| ;; one sentence per line (defun wrap-at-sentences () "Fills the
| current paragraph, but starts each sentence on a new line."
| (interactive) (save-excursion ;; Select the entire paragraph.
| (mark-paragraph) ;; Move to the start of the paragraph. (goto-
| char (region-beginning)) ;; Record the location of the end of the
| paragraph. (setq end-of-paragraph (region-end)) ;; Wrap lines
| with 'hard' newlines (i.e., real line breaks). (let ((use-hard-
| newlines 't)) ;; Loop over each sentence in the paragraph. (while
| (< (point) end-of-paragraph) ;; Determine the region spanned by
| the sentence. (setq start-of-sentence (point)) (forward-sentence)
| ;; Wrap the sentence with hard newlines. (fill-region start-of-
| sentence (point)) ;; Delete the whitespace following the period,
| if any. (while (char-equal (char-syntax (preceding-char)) ?\s)
| (delete-char -1)) ;; Insert a newline before the next sentence.
| (insert "\n")))))
|
| (global-set-key (kbd "M-j") 'wrap-at-sentences)
| mad44 wrote:
| Fine, here you go, with the line breaks
|
| ;; one sentence per line
|
| (defun wrap-at-sentences () "Fills the current
| paragraph, but starts each sentence on a new line."
| (interactive) (save-excursion ;; Select
| the entire paragraph. (mark-paragraph)
| ;; Move to the start of the paragraph. (goto-char
| (region-beginning)) ;; Record the location of the
| end of the paragraph. (setq end-of-paragraph
| (region-end)) ;; Wrap lines with 'hard' newlines
| (i.e., real line breaks). (let ((use-hard-newlines
| 't)) ;; Loop over each sentence in the
| paragraph. (while (< (point) end-of-paragraph)
| ;; Determine the region spanned by the sentence.
| (setq start-of-sentence (point)) (forward-
| sentence) ;; Wrap the sentence with hard
| newlines. (fill-region start-of-sentence
| (point)) ;; Delete the whitespace following
| the period, if any. (while (char-equal (char-
| syntax (preceding-char)) ?\s) (delete-char
| -1)) ;; Insert a newline before the next
| sentence. (insert "\n")))))
|
| (global-set-key (kbd "M-j") 'wrap-at-sentences)
| capableweb wrote:
| Ironically, this snippet seems to be a bit _too_ much wrapped!
|
| You need to have a empty line between each line on HN for it to
| format correctly. If you also ident it by four space, it gets
| marked as code in the markup.
| yvdriess wrote:
| I just love the irony that one needs to manually insert
| newlines to copy over code to automate inserting newlines.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Good advice. There are a few nice tools out there to support
| technical writing. I think one of them was featured on HN a few
| days ago: vale.
|
| This is a tool that allows for applying simple regular expression
| based rules to enforce style rules. The idea is that you can tune
| this to your needs and cover all sorts of stylistic rules. For
| example, gender neutrality might be a desirable thing in the
| documentation for some tech companies and you can get it to flag
| things that are clearly not gender neutral.
|
| Another thing worth mentioning is Jetbrains Grazie Professional
| (warning it's different from the normal grazie plugin, which is
| confusing), which actually integrates vale and can be used as a
| plugin for editing both code comments and markdown files in
| Intellij and other Jetbrains IDEs.
|
| In general, treating text like you would treat programming code
| as a thing that has rules that can be figured out and enforced is
| a good mindset. I learned to write coherent text while doing my
| Ph. D. a long time ago. At some point I figured out that anything
| I'm doing consistently wrong, I can just learn to do consistently
| right. I just need to be open for criticism and figure out why
| something is wrong/not ideal. You kind of learn to look for
| things that you've done wrong before in your own text and then
| you fix it. A lot of these rules aren't rocket science. You just
| need to know about them. There's a whole grey area between
| grammatically correct and stylistically pleasing/acceptable.
| Having tools point out things that are likely problematic helps.
| keewee7 wrote:
| Months ago I noticed that I was doing this because of a (bad?)
| coding habit. It meant that my writing was recognizable across
| multiple reddit and discussion board accounts I don't want to be
| associated with each other. I stopped Writing One Sentence per
| Line after that.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Did you read the article? The author says to write with one
| sentence per line, not to _publish_ with one sentence per line.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| This reads like it was written by a third-grader. Accessible?
| Maybe. Enjoyable? Not in my book.
|
| As a German speaker, I feel like English prose is already
| extremely biased towards short sentences. This makes some sense,
| as German has much more grammar to make these sentences readable
| and unambiguous.
|
| At some point, I feel like making sentences even shorter does not
| aid the readability, but rather stands in its way.
| xwdv wrote:
| Sentences are just a tool for exchanging an idea. The actual
| sentence doesn't matter, only the idea.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| The article isn't advocating making sentences shorter. It is
| using short sentences, but that is not what is being said.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| If you want five-line sentences with plenty of dashes and
| semicolons then the American Humanities still has got you
| covered.
| mbg117 wrote:
| This article had more to do with the visual separation of
| sentences, so they're easier to inspect at a glance, and not so
| much how small they are.
|
| Not necessarily the containment of each sentence to a single
| line, but a new line between each sentence to maintain
| separation.
| planetsprite wrote:
| tech bloggers discover greentexting
| bregma wrote:
| This was the rule in the 1980s when using nroff and it's a habit
| I developed when using any markup. It's good to know that it's
| been rediscovered again as newcomers mature in their tool use.
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