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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.
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.
EDIT: Meaning that I think this kind of justification is more interesting since it is meant to affect the process of writing itself.
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would require accurately detecting the end of the sentence which is not an easy thing to do correctly consistently.
Two spaces between sentences makes this easy, and should be just as easy a habit as 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.
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.
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.
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 f…
Sounds interesting. Can you explain this?
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…
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.