I've done something like this when writing grant applications, etc. When space is at a premium, strategically shortening/deleting words to eliminate a widow can gain you a whole line :)
“I just chose words carefully”
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Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#252Full justification is a plague
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
The term for this is a "shibboleth", if it's of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
A shibboleth is a little more specific: it's the pronunciation of one specific sound in a different way that marks out a person as from one specific group. So, some of the go-tos... New Zealand English tends to turn an /i/ in even stressed positions into schwa (the sound on the end of "little", or "umbrella", or "gopher", and one of the key sounds to master for a non-native learner who wants to improve their English…
> and this is _the_ way to distinguish a Kiwi from an Australian
Well, that, and Kiwis tend to say "hey bro" a lot ;)
Beached Whale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdVHZwI8pcA
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is finding one person suitable to be a parent (to make them a foster parent) differently hard, than finding another person suitable to be a parent (to marry them)?
Fewer people want to foster than to have their own kids?
Also, marriage doesn’t imply children.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#255this is only tangentially related to the article, but I've always found text justification strange. For me paragraphs with ragged edges are easier to read than justified paragraphs, because the irregular ending point helps me keep track of where I am. And justification can lead to some very odd-looking lines. So I've just never quite understood why it's so common in typesetting
Fully justified text looks much better when it’s more narrow columns, especially multiple; full page width text is usually not the main use case
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#256I like the idea that arbitrary constraints can actually improve writing. Without a constraint, it's easy to fall back on familiar phrasing, while having to work around something unusual forces you to reconsider each word. I wonder if this applies to programming and other creative work too.
Live is short, required time to market is even shorter. Arbitrary constraints might work if you have nothing better to do, but if you have a goal, or specific ideas you want to train, you'll get more natural constraints.
> Live is short, required time to market is even shorter.
Life is too short to think of it in terms of markets and money.
> if you have nothing better to do
The way to create something novel is through creativity, and creativity comes from restrictions because they force you to think in novel ways.
There is a time for experimentation and a time for doing. The latter is not “something better to do” than the former, they both have their place.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#257Made me think of constrained writing like what was done by the Oulipo group in France.
Exactly, I was about to mention George Perec, one of its members, who wrote novels under very hard constraints such as "La disparition", a whole readable novel without the letter "e", which is as hard as or harder than an English speaker would expect. He also wrote "Les Revenentes", which is a novel only using words with no other vowel than "e" (and some liberties he had to take with the language to make that work).
Interestingly, the novel with no "e" was actually translated into English multiple times (most famous one is called 'A Void'), proof that constrained writing is something quite a few people seem to enjoy.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Widows are when the final line of a paragraph starts the next page. Orphans are when the first line of a paragraph ends a page.
Funny because "fixing an orphan" is hard in real life (assuming they've lost both their parents, you have to find them a foster home) but easy in typesetting (just add an empty line before), whereas "fixing a widow" is easy in real life (just remarry) but hard in typesetting.
Sorta.
Neither the human orphan nor the widow is fixed by your description; they simply aren't alone either more.
The child is still an orphan; the woman a widow.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#259In a similar vein, Taylor Otwell from Laravel writes his comment blocks exactly three lines long and each line is three characters shorter than the line above, e.g. /* |-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Application Name |-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | This value is the name of your application, which will be used when the | fra…
that is anxiety, not design