Writing one sentence per line • Hacker News Board

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#191

Post by bertil » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:41 PM UTC

drivers99 wrote: post #127

bertil wrote: post #96

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…

> find the widest piece of context that explain the rest. Sounds interesting. Can you explain this?

French, especially academic writing, can have a lot of subordinate clauses:

> I asked the person who was standing there.

It has even more oratory precautions:

> We can argue that this result, that was seemingly proven wrong by a previous analysis, appear to be a consequence of a previous attempt that was investigated by my esteemed colleagues, who have looked into the author and found out that they …

If you want to split between each verb as they are, you end up with sentences that are in the wrong order:

> I asked a person. That person was standing there.

> We can argue that this result appear to be a consequence of a previous attempt. This result was seemingly proven wrong by a previous analysis. The attempt was investigated by my esteemed colleagues. My colleagues have looked into the author. They found out that the author…

So you are better off by thinking: what comes first? The person was standing there _before_ I asked, and I asked them because they were standing, so that information should come first:

> A person was standing there. I asked them.

Further, most actions in a chain of preposition explain a decision: those should come first.

> This result was surprising. Sceptics wanted to verify it. Their investigation concluded that the result was wrong. My colleagues wanted to know more. They investigated the authors of the result. They found out…

The outcome is a bit drier. The benefit is that if one sentence is longer, or an adjective inverted, or a complement put at the begining of the sentence, it’s more striking. That helps attracting attention to what matters, selectively.

For academic writing, you don’t need as many oratory precautions because you can report other findings without having to validate them as yours: you present them all as facts on equal footing. If you agree, it’s implied from the lack of criticism. If you disagree, it’s on you to prove why _after_ presenting the work fairly. For that, you have to include the key aspect to support you criticism in your first presentation.

I can also give the impression that you are just moving forward without a clear goal: “This happened, in particular then this happened, then this reacted…” which is why you want to summarise your point early: people will see the arguement getting closer to its goal, knowing what that goal is.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#192

Post by ghaff » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:42 PM UTC

swamp40 wrote: post #174

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.

>No idea why

Because that tends to be how people skim.

If the first sentence of a paragraph doesn't catch their attention in some way, they subconsciously assume that the rest of the paragraph (which is presumably related) doesn't need to be read.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#193

Post by mbg117 » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

Hendrikto wrote: post #121

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.

This article had more to do with the visual separation of sentences, so they're easier to inspect at a glance, and not so much how small they are.

Not necessarily the containment of each sentence to a single line, but a new line between each sentence to maintain separation.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#194

Post by ghaff » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

kadoban wrote: post #169

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.

Yeah I believe this is a generational thing. I learned double-space as well, but pretty sure not long after me they stopped teaching that, and I've totally stopped doing it.

Double spaces was the norm on (almost always monospaced font) typewriters [EDIT: in English]. I assume it lingered on computers until sometime in the 80s but was shifting especially once proportional fonts for written material (other than things like code of course) became the norm.

I couldn't tell you when I switched.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#195

Post by Zababa » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

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...

> When my math teachers told me "just do the practice problems", I also thought they were idiots, but they were actually right...

Reading more would be reading problems. Doing practice problems is equivalent to writing and having someone/something point out if it's good or not.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#196

Post by matwood » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:57 PM UTC

3qz wrote: 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?

I'm not really a fan of 1 line per sentence as the default, but agree with more breaks. Also know your audience. My default structure is:

- Ask for what I want/why did I sent this email.

- Explanation why using logical breaks.

Which usually means I write my email, take the last line and make it first.

If I'm emailing a technical colleague I'll include more details. CEO, 1 line bullet points.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#197

Post by fknorangesite » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:57 PM UTC

HKH2 wrote: post #173

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.…

Five word sentences are fine. The first paragraph is not; the content itself is dull. Do it with useful sentences.

Of course. Hence

> But several together become monotonous.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#198

Post by JoshCole » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #165

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…

This is a problem with most advice on English writing. They only teach you how to write as at a level that a 8 years old reader would understand. Most modern books, fiction or not, are written at a juvenile level, at the formal request of publishers. As a result, the level of reading and comprehension for most people has decreased to a level that is lower than in any other literate society.

> they only teach you how to write as at a level that a 8 years old reader would understand.

Many if not most modern writing advice will remind you to focus on your audience. Most audiences aren't composed of eight year olds. So it isn't true that most advice suggests writing for eight year olds.

> As a result, the level of reading and comprehension for most people has decreased to a level that is lower than in any other literate society.

We track statistics like reading comprehension and you can look them up. I did. The source I found showed that every state in the US I checked - with the exception of Michigan (??) - has reading comprehension improve relative to the year 2003. In some cases this improvement is by a notable amount, in some cases not so notable.

It seems unlikely to me that people now are worse at reading and writing than people used to be. Writing is more common now and reading is more common too. Once, journalists wrote. Now everyone does.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#199

Post by afterburner » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

swamp40 wrote: post #174

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.

Although the article does mention this is supposed to be an organization trick for your eyes only:

> Not publishing one sentence per line, no. Write like this for your eyes only. HTML or Markdown combine separate lines into one paragraph.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#200

Post by Mageek » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

I absolutely love doing this. I often write in LaTeX, where new lines don’t effect the typeset output. It is so much easier to see git diffs, comment sentences out, move sentences, identify a sentence by its line number, etc. as well.