Been doing this forever but not for a particular reaso.
Writing one sentence per line
151–160 of 307 posts
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#152Good 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.
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#153This 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?
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.
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#154This 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…
as they say: those who can't do, teach
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#155Earlier 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 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.
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#156I 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.
Exactly, I mostly write in Latex and one-sentence-per-line makes so much sense for that.
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.)
Fair enough, but I still think the user could benefit from a gentle nudge here:)
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#158Tangentially related: "Omit needless words." -William Strunk, The Elements of Style Highly recommended book for anyone who wants to be a more effective writer.
Authors of the excellent "Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose," Francis-Noël 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
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#159This 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.
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#160I 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.