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Writing one sentence per line

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Re: Writing one sentence per line

#201

Post by blobbers »

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…

Some people are going to respond "reading more is the right thing to do".

As in: practice makes perfect. Observing a master, will make you a master.

But unless your eye or brain can detect what they're doing, it can feel hopeless.

Sometimes having it broken out like this really helps. I found this amazing too!

So really, perfect practice makes perfect. Or at least saves time and avoids forming bad habits along the way.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#202

Post by Qub3d »

strgcmc wrote: post #137
awestroke wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Outside of classroom-style dedicated instruction, this really does seem to be the best form of learning, i.e. a semi-active/not-fully-passive approach. There is generally no "hack" that the student can use to avoid having to read a lot of stuff, in order to learn and especially to become an expert. What a student needs to read, isn't necessarily textbooks or the traditional orthodoxy of materials, but still there is…

This is all brushing up against the central theme of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which approaches its core thesis by dissecting the process of teaching college students how to "write Quality".

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#203

Post by mad44 »

mad44 wrote: post #88

I had copied this Emacs macro just for doing that. ;; one sentence per line (defun wrap-at-sentences () "Fills the current paragraph, but starts each sentence on a new line." (interactive) (save-excursion ;; Select the entire paragraph. (mark-paragraph) ;; Move to the start of the paragraph. (goto-char (region-beginning)) ;; Record the location of the end of the paragraph. (setq end-of-paragraph (region-end)) ;; Wrap…

Fine, here you go, with the line breaks

;; one sentence per line

(defun wrap-at-sentences ()

  "Fills the current paragraph, but starts each sentence on a new line."

  (interactive)

  (save-excursion

    ;; Select the entire paragraph.

    (mark-paragraph)

    ;; Move to the start of the paragraph.

    (goto-char (region-beginning))

    ;; Record the location of the end of the paragraph.

    (setq end-of-paragraph (region-end))

    ;; Wrap lines with 'hard' newlines (i.e., real line breaks).

    (let ((use-hard-newlines 't))

      ;; Loop over each sentence in the paragraph.

      (while (
(global-set-key (kbd "M-j") 'wrap-at-sentences)

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#204

Post by crayboff »

afterburner wrote: post #199
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.

Ironically it seems he may have only read the beginning of the article and skimmed past the rest.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#206

Post by earth_walker »

ghaff wrote: post #194
kadoban wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was taught to use double spaces in highschool typing class (we used electric typewriters with the buffer off). In the ~35 years since I have only ever met a handful of people, all older than me, who did it in practice.

I continued through university while using a computer to type things up, I'm pretty sure my thesis had double spaces after periods, written in WP. Once I graduated I dropped it pretty quickly.

Was there an early version of Word's spell-check-on-the-fly that underlined double spaces, or am I miss-remembering?

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#207

Post by joedavison »

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.

The semicolon is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. That makes your example 5-10-5 words instead of 5-5-5-5. Try using a period instead of semicolon and hear how it sounds.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#209

Post by luhn »

One big advantage not mentioned in the article particularly relevant to this audience: git diffs (or your VCS of choice). One sentence per line means diffs will operate per-sentence, rather than per-paragraph. This way the diff can capture the restructuring of the paragraph (adding/removing/replacing a sentence), which gives much more insight than swapping out the paragraph wholesale. It also means minor changes (e.g. typo fixes) will only add+delete a single sentence, making it much easier to identify what has actually changed from one commit to the next.

I take this a step further and will often split out a single sentence into a clause per line, but this is a judgement call rather than a hard and fast rule.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#210

Post by ghaff »

earth_walker wrote: post #206
ghaff wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was taught to use double spaces in highschool typing class (we used electric typewriters with the buffer off). In the ~35 years since I have only ever met a handful of people, all older than me, who did it in practice. I continued through university while using a computer to type things up, I'm pretty sure my thesis had double spaces after periods, written in WP. Once I graduated I dropped it pretty quickly. Was th…

>Was there an early version of Word's spell-check-on-the-fly that underlined double spaces, or am I miss-remembering?

I don't remember that and I was a fairly early user of Word going back to DOS days although I rarely use it any longer.

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