241–250 of 307 posts
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
I think the advice is still useful for editing. Personally, I'd add the extra step of re-consolidating the sentences into paragraphs after going through this editing phase though. That said, I do a lot of technical writing and I often find paragraphs with fewer sentences are my better written paragraphs.
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.
Also please rehearse what you would say to your family if you got into a car wreck and they wanted to check you out at the hospital versus “mom is going into surgery for massive hemorrhaging.”
“Hey son, we’re okay, but we got into a bad fender bender and we’re getting checked out at Hoskin’s Hospital. The car is dead so can you come pick us up, maybe bring X and Y and have your sister check on the cats?”
Is a way shorter moment of sheer terror than switching around the sentence fragments at the beginning. Also if you’re a boss having an unscheduled meeting with someone, stalling the agenda is just torturing the other person.
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
The first thing that stood out to me was the robotic nature of his writing. It seems like he's going so far out of his way to remove "unnecessary" words from sentences, and remove "unnecessary" sentences from his paragraphs, and to stringently vary his sentence lengths, that he winds up writing unnatural language. If you write in a way people aren't accustomed to, your readers are going to have a harder time understanding you.
"Sometimes short. Sometimes long." "Cut three lines. Paste them up above."
This isn't how English is used.
I approach this by separating writing from editing. Just keep writing, ignore the typos, self-censorship or formatting and keep moving. So, I've build myself an app to make that easier. Essentially, it's just a more stupid version of a text box. It's free, it's private, and it's meant to put you in the state of flow. I've been using it every day for the past 3 years or so and I know that some people find it useful to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In his defense, he is saying to write "one sentence per line" only _while_ you are writing/editing. He says this is "for your eyes only", and that you'll recombine into paragraphs afterwards. I think the idea is that, if your sentence can stand up to the added scrutiny you'll give it while seeing it sitting all alone, then it is worth keeping. Otherwise it is a wasteful sentence. Anyway, I do agree that the actual "o…
At this point, I think it's wasted breath to try to respond to the people who skim over articles without comprehension (or who don't appear to read the articles at all) and who instead just respond to the title.
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…
I think we need to start changing this. In an era of language servers, perhaps our diff tools should be semantic instead of line based. I get so tired of seeing diffs where I add a function and the diff shows that I added it inside the previous function instead of between them, because it starts the diff one line too early.
People often say of git, "The porcelain is bad but the plumbing is good". The opposite is true for digging, IMO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the advice is still useful for editing. Personally, I'd add the extra step of re-consolidating the sentences into paragraphs after going through this editing phase though. That said, I do a lot of technical writing and I often find paragraphs with fewer sentences are my better written paragraphs.
I'd argue that the job of clumping adjacent sentences together into paragraphs is a job for whatever builds/renders the writing, not for the writer.
Paragraphs — like punctuation, grammar, syncopation, etc. etc. — express semantic intent. They're not, like, type faces. They're one of the tools that ·authors· use to communicate meaning.
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…
> My advice to anyone who writes: Try writing one sentence per line. I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and it improved my writing more than anything else. Who is the judge of 'it improved my writing more than anything else'? What was the 'anything else' for that matter. This is a particular writing style just like Aaron Sorkin has a particular style. Some people like that style to others it's annoying. https://the…
> Who is the judge of 'it improved my writing more than anything else'?
Who do you think? Who wrote the article? The word 'my' might be a hint.
> What was the 'anything else' for that matter.
Would you give him permission to describe one practice he adopted while writing without describing every single step he's made in learning how to write since he was a child?