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Writing one sentence per line

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Re: Writing one sentence per line

#111

Post by wongarsu »

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)

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.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#112

Post by eddd-ddde »

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'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.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#113

Post by t-3 »

SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #99
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 te…

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...

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#114

Post by wongarsu »

TheFreim wrote: post #108
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#115

Post by DawsonBruce »

Beltalowda wrote: post #95
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.

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!

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#116

Post by jalino23 »

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.…

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

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#117

Post by rpastuszak »

MrDunham wrote: post #75
rpastuszak wrote: post #20

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 to…

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…

> 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 Ensō would probably have two modes: keyboard + dictation.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#118

Post by novalis78 »

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.…

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.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#119

Post by awestroke »

t-3 wrote: post #113
SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

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...

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?

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#120

Post by rpastuszak »

MrGilbert wrote: post #45
rpastuszak wrote: post #20

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 to…

There is a small typo on the start page: "[...] to say istead of how you want to say it." Instead is missing a "n". :)

Good timing, I took today off to do some (late) spring cleaning. Fixed, thanks.
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