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Writing one sentence per line

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181–190 of 307 posts

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#181

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.

Why would you do that in your emails?

/s

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#182
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.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#184
post #147

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?

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.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#187

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.

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

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#189
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

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.

"Forgive me this long letter—I had not the time to make it short."

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#190
post #7

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.

> 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.

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.
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