Writing one sentence per line • Hacker News Board

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#221

Post by majormajor » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:30 PM UTC

luhn wrote: post #209

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…

Many GUI diff tools will do this neatly regardless of whitespace, FWIW, so this hasn't been a motivator for me for code or text.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#222

Post by HKH2 » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:33 PM UTC

joedavison wrote: post #207

HKH2 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What difference does it make? They are multiples of five. Are they okay to him? I doubt that is so. He dislikes chunks of five. He was not prescribing semicolons. That would still bother him.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#223

Post by dws » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:33 PM UTC

Elsewhere, https://sive.rs/book/ShortSentences, Sivers recommends "Several Short Sentences About Writing", which is a perspective on writing that I'd not seen before. A useful read if you want to practice his present advice.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#224

Post by dchest » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:40 PM UTC

mirrorlake wrote: post #184

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?

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.

Why do you need a longer article for such a simple idea?

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#225

Post by joegahona » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

I read Ken Rand's "10% Solution"[0] in ~2001 on the recommendation of longtime Washington Post copy chief Bill Walsh, who died a few years ago[1]. I can't believe how much of its advice has stuck with me and how much it has helped me. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to optimize their writing.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/10-Solution-Ken-Rand-ebook/dp/B07FC7G...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/bill-walsh-copy-editor-...

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#226

Post by nequo » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #33

black_puppydog wrote: post #2

Or, with a bit more nuance: Semantic line breaks https://sembr.org/

> 5. A semantic line break SHOULD occur after an independent clause as punctuated by a comma (,), semicolon (;), colon (:), or em dash (—). Uh oh, that’s incompatible with standard em dash usage, which is with no surrounding whitespace. (I’m designing a lightweight markup language of my own, and it’s tempting to special-case an em dash at the end of a line that is not preceded by a space, to join to the next line wit…

Useless info but in LaTeX, you could write %\n instead of \n to prevent the surrounding whitespace.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#227

Post by wnoise » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:48 PM UTC

Many comments have mentioned both the benefits to diffing, and various --word-diff options. Unfortunately word-merge tools are harder to find. You can of course use smudge/clean filters to unwrap and rewrap text, but those are quite fiddly to set up and fragile in practice.

It isn't the main point of https://github.com/neilbrown/wiggle , but it can actually diff and merge on a word basis. A git merge driver is fairly easy to set up.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#228

Post by andruc » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

eddd-ddde wrote: post #112

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.…

I'm gonna be honest, my mind got bored in the long sentence and completely skipped like half the words. I think I'm just too used to reading documentation and skipping 50% of the words so I can see how to do something quicker.

I wouldn't recommend consuming art like we do documentation.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#229

Post by euroderf » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #93

kadoban wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's about as unnatural for most people as newline per sentence, and has the added risk that you'll accidentally publish like that and it'll look weird. One per line would be _much_ harder to accidentally publish because it's more obvious.

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.

I've seen two spaces listed as a "resumé don't-do" cos it marks you as an oldster.

Re: Writing one sentence per line

#230

Post by preseinger » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

One sentence per line makes prose feel sanctimonious, even self-aggrandizing. I find this dude's writing un-readable for exactly this reason. All of his articles are like HTML versions of the Ducks Go Quack TED Talk [0]. I just roll my eyes.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s