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Writing one sentence per line

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Re: Writing one sentence per line

#91

Post by lifthrasiir »

chrismorgan wrote: post #33
black_puppydog wrote: post #2

Or, with a bit more nuance: Semantic line breaks https://sembr.org/

> 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 wit…

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

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#92

Post by Jaruzel »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #72
Jaruzel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markdown allows you to inline HTML, so just use the 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.

You can’t downvote direct replies; Only upvote. Meaning any downvotes you’ve received were from others.

good point! (I knew that, honest)

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#93

Post by BeFlatXIII »

kadoban wrote: post #84
dubya wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two spaces between sentences makes this easy, and should be just as easy a habit as one sentence per line.

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.

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.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#95

Post by Beltalowda »

drewg123 wrote: post #90

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.

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.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#96

Post by bertil »

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.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#97

Post by marcosdumay »

gnulinux wrote: post #82
Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #8

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.…

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)

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.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#98

Post by II2II »

nojs wrote: post #76

> 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!

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.)

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#99

Post by SkeuomorphicBee »

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #8

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.…

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."

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#100

Post by Beltalowda »

capableweb wrote: post #61
wheybags wrote: post #53

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.

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 Gi…

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.

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